In a text written to conclude her collected works, Carola Giedion-Welcker expresses her gratitude, as one usually does, to her editor among other people. But most importantly, she puts forward two aspects of the friendship that bound her to the artists who she devoted many of her texts to.

She explains how her friends opened up her interest to other realms. For instance, how her acquaintance with Hans Arp made her realise the importance of poets such as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry and Roussel - all marginal writers in those days - hence the title of the anthology that she dedicated to them: po‘tes - l’écart or side poets. She also recounts how the friendship that bound artists and critics made it possible for her to enter Picasso’s studio and see ‘Guernica’ as a work in progress. This kind of comradeship was later to disappear with the increasingly predominant role of the interview.

In this paper I will explore these two elements of friendship, because I beleive friendship for Giedion-Welcker is not only of biographical importance: friendship for her is a theoretical principle, with which she builds a new art-historical approach.

The first element investigates the potential of friendship, as a refelction on the self and the other, or the same and the different. In Pour l’amitié (For friendship) published in 1996 (which I don’t believe has been translated into English), Maurice Blanchot reminds us that friendship doesn’t only mean reciprocity, as the Greek concept of philia did. It is not only a movement from the Same to the Same, but is also an opening to the Other, or even in Blanchot’s words ‘an awakening’.

The second element deals with the problem of articulation between artist and work, between life and art. Giedion-Welcker recollects of her first encounter with ‘Guernica’ in Picasso’s studio, the context in which she first apprehended this work left her with a strong impression which coloured her subsequent encounters in with the painting in other places. What happens to the work when it is seen in the artist’s studio? What transpires from the man into the work? And how is it possible to take this movement into account as an art historian with a rigorous attention to the work? In 1977 Giedion-Welcker received a prize for her cultural activity from the city of Zürich. The art historian Eduard Hüttinger in his praising speech mentioned the ‘authenticity of her gaze’. This genuine and accurate gaze, to which Hüttinger alludes, was educated by teachers such as Heinrich W?lfflin and Wilhelm Worringer. They remained, I think, references for Giedion-Welcker throughout her life. How is it possible to blend together, on one hand this very rigorous attention to the work and on the other hand friendship with the artist? In this conjunction the artist’s studio doubtlessly plays an important role.