阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂

Galerie Maeght, Paris

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1964)

Margot Pollins Schab, LLC, New York (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above

Kassel, Documenta III, 1964, no. 1149

Félix-Jacques Coulin, Giacometti: Sculptures, New York, 1964, illustration of another cast p. 20

Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1965, illustration of another cast p. 75 

Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, illustration of another cast p. 262

Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, St. Paul-de-Vence, 1972, no. 19, illustration of another cast p. 101
 
Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, no. 515, illustration of another cast p. 510

Very good condition. Brown patina with light brown under tones. Specks of accretions in the deepest crevices. The bronze is structurally sound.
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Annette Venise was Giacometti's first large-scale bronze bust of his wife and muse.  In his seminal monograph on the artist, Yves Bonnefoy suggests that it was with this series of Anette bust portraits that Giacometti came closest to fulfilling his ambition to capture the physical and psychological presence of his model. The greatness of these sculptures, Bonnefoy wrote, lies in the “flame in the depth of the eyes, somehow captured in bronze, which testifies to the fact of life in those glances which are doomed to become decaying matter.  It seems as though Giacometti's sole concern was to preserve that furtive presence from the flames of death" (Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., p. 51). Annette Venise is thus a spellbinding, final homage to the woman who had served as one of Giacometti’s most important muses since the day they had met in Geneva in the fall of 1943, when she was just twenty years old.

Alberto and Annette were married in 1949, and by the time he conceived of the present work Giacometti had been painting and drawing Annette for over a decade and a half; only his brother Diego could rival her in terms of prominence within his work. Giacometti was notoriously demanding of his sitters, expecting them to pose absolutely immobile for hours on end within the famously ramshackle surroundings of his studio on rue Hippolyte-Maindron, and he felt strongly that it was precisely his intimacy with his models that brought about a sense of unfamiliarity when he placed them under the intense scrutiny of these sessions. In the last decade of his life, Giacometti was increasingly drawn to working from life in sculpture too, having previously eschewed it, and it was to those closest to him, principally Annette and Diego, that he turned to once again for models. The present work was executed at a time when the relationship between the artist and his wife was increasingly fraught, however, for it was only a year previously that Giacometti had met Caroline, a young woman who had quickly become his mistress and would remain an important part of his life and work until his death in 1966. While Annette remained a vital presence in Giacometti’s life and continued to visit his studio daily, there appears to have been some strain between them and it was perhaps Giacometti’s desire, or need, for a fresh appraisal of his wife’s character under this upheaval in both his life and art that prompted his decision to turn to her features in his sculpture at this moment in time.

The reality of Annette’s physical proximity here is evidenced by the incredible opulence of the surface of the present work; a legacy of the probing, darting movements of the artist’s hands when he modeled her features. As he adds substance to the figure of Annette in this sculpture, he heightens her expressiveness by kneading into the recesses of her eyes, the furrows of her brow, and the curls of her hair. Indeed, the naturalism of the depiction in Annette Venise lies in stark contrast to the busts that Giacometti had made of Diego in the 1950s in which he reduced the volume of his brother’s head to a knife-edge. For all this, there is an undeniable, almost tangible, sense of solitude and psychological distance in the figure here, accentuated by Giacometti’s intense focus on his subject’s eyes, which completely dominate the bust, fixing the viewer with the intensity of their wide, unblinking gaze.

For Giacometti, it was the head in particular that presented a problem in terms of depiction – it contained the brain, the character, the personality, the face – and, during an interview in 1966, he confirmed that it was a subject’s eyes that fascinated him most of all. He explained, "When you look at a face you always look at the eyes.... Now the strange thing is, when you represent the eye precisely, you risk destroying exactly what you are after, namely the gaze.... In none of my sculptures since the war have I represented the eye precisely.  I indicate the position of the eye.  And I very often use a vertical line in place of the pupil.  It's the curve of the eyeball one sees.  And it gives the impression of the gaze.... When I get the curve of the eyeball right, then I've got the socket; when I get the socket, I've got the nostrils, the point of the nose, the mouth... and all of this together might just produce the gaze, without one's having to concentrate on the eye itself" (quoted in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, Los Angeles, 1995, p. 189).