Alberto Giacometti

Estate of Annette Giacometti (sale: Christie's, Paris, Sculptures par Alberto Giacometti provenant de la sucession Annette Giacometti, 28th September 2002, lot 11)
Private Collection, Japan (purchased at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's, New York, 4th May 2005, lot 335)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Alberto Giacometti, dibujo, escultura, pintura (exhibition catalogue), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1990-91, no. 192, illustration of another cast p. 445
Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins (exhibition catalogue), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1991-92, no. 85, illustration of another cast p. 176
L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2007-08, no. 159, illustration of another cast p. 363

Attractive green and brown patina. Apart from some light wear to the protruding areas (especially to the breasts and the buttocks of the figure) and some faint oxidation marks mostly on the base of the bronze, this work is in very good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In January 1948, just after the present work was conceived, Alberto Giacometti was given his first one man show in fifteen years, by Pierre Matisse in his gallery in New York. Though Giacometti already had a mythical underground reputation amongst the Parisian intelligentsia, few had actually seen his recent work. This legendary exhibition showed what he had been busy experimenting with since his break from Surrealism, introduced him properly to America, and quite simply sparked the artist's meteoric rise to international fame. According to David Sylvester its catalogue was 'like a talisman', whose notoriety did indeed ensure that the implications of the exhibition continued long after the works came down. It was as the preface to this catalogue that Sartre's essay 'The Search for the Absolute' was first published. Laurie Wilson has argued that 'even more than Giacometti's words, Sartre's text set a course for interpretations of Giacometti's post war work that hasn't been challenged in fifty years' (Laurie Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man, London, 2003, p. 232).

Sartre asks us to consider Giacometti as a sculptor outside of the confines of art historical notions of progress, who has rejected 'a priori' rules. He alludes to Giacometti's fresh perspective and his practice of perpetually starting again, and that his work must be considered as a response to, or as an attempt on the way to solving, the problem of 'how to mould a man in stone without petrifying him?' Sartre describes Giacometti's vulnerable figures as 'half-way between nothingness and being', an interpretation loaded with existentialist connotations of the fragility of life.

Giacometti is frustrated by the way that stone restricts his movements, and Sartre explains the qualities that make plaster so appealing to him: its weightlessness, ductility, and above all its fragility and spirituality. Every one of Giacometti's adventures, ideas, desires, and dreams are projected into those malleable plaster figures, whose perpetual metamorphosis is reflective of his changing moods and attitudes. Sartre expresses delight at Giacometti's assertion that his sculptures were made to last for a mere few hours and comparing their transience to that of a dawn, or a sadness. He talks of the 'perishable grace' of the statues and of the strange flour-like plaster, and argues that 'never before has a material been less eternal, more fragile, more close to being human'. Sartre applauds Giacometti's sensitivity to the fluctuations of life, which prevents the figures from ever being definitive depictions: 'Giacometti never talks of eternity, and never even thinks of it.'

Sartre dismisses the expanded gestures of other sculptors who 'put too much in their works' in favour of Giacometti's reductive approach. Though Giacometti knows that no part of the human body is redundant he is also aware that 'space is a cancer upon being, and eats everything; to sculpt for him is to take the fat off space'.

It could well have been with the plaster of the present work in mind that Sartre wrote the wonderfully evocative words about 'a woman complete whose delicious plumpness is haunted by a secret thinness, and whose terrible thinness by a suave plumpness, a complete woman, in danger on this earth, and yet not utterly of this earth, and who lives and tells us of the astonishing adventure of the flesh, our adventure.' There is much to learn about human experience from an engagement with these sculptures. In an essay that both forecasted and helped to generate Giacometti's mythical reputation, Sartre accurately predicts that 'men are going to come to his place to strip it, and carry off all his works, even to the plaster that covers the floor.'

(All references are translated from the French, Jean-Paul Sartre, 'La recerche de l'absolu', in Situations, III, Paris, 1949)