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Lot Essay
The present bronze is one in a series of ten portrait busts that Giacometti created of his wife, Annette, between 1962 and 1965. A decade earlier, the artist had transitioned away from the iconic, attenuated figures with which he had secured international fame in favour of a more realistic and concrete sense of space that nonetheless preserved the intense expressivity that he had painstakingly cultivated over time. This shift also rekindled Giacometti’s interest in painting and drawing, and the artist began anew to work in front of a model, most often his brother Diego or, as seen here, Annette. From the intense and energetic markings on the present work, one can easily imagine the artist’s hands continually building up and breaking down the plaster image of his wife as he sat before her. Indeed the slender, extended neck seems to raise her head, with the essential traits of her large eyes, pointed nose, and delicate
chin, out from the abstracted mass that is the supporting base of this work. Giacometti met Annette Arm while living in Geneva shortly after the Second World War. She accompanied him back to Paris in the Summer of 1946, posing for him each day for hours on end.
They eventually married in July 1949. While still in Switzerland, Giacometti introduced Annette to acquaintances such as the philosopher Jean Starobinski, who remarked that ‘She was a young woman who stood “facing you”, who watched, and spoke, and met life “head on,“ infinitely candid and infinitely reserved, in a wonderful frontality’ (quoted in V. Wiesinger, The Women of Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2000, p.18). Simone de Beauvoir similarly stated that she possessed a “gruff rationalism [and] boldness,” and further commented, ‘Her eyes devoured the world. She couldn’t stand missing anything or anyone; she liked violence and laughed about everything’ (quoted in V. Wiesinger, op. cit., 2000, p. 18.).
Giacometti’s portraits of Annette also demonstrate his assertion that sculpture should capture an essential quality of the sitter through an extreme measure of style rather than physiognomic verisimilitude. The art of past cultures, maintained the sculptor, could serve as a model for this endeavour. Commenting on Giacometti’s quest for realism, Christian Klemm has written: ‘Giacometti searched in all mediums for a new, more rigorous evocation of the ephemeral living model. The drawings, with the purity of their delineation, vividly demonstrate a canon of proportions that would seem to have been devised for eternity—and where Giacometti came ever closer to achieving the effect of Egyptian art. In painting, too, the lines that give the face and gaze their vibrancy achieved a new clarity. In sculpture, an immediately striking feature of the heads is the artist’s renewed interest in the pedestal and the very different forms it can take. Here, again, Giacometti sought to combine a moment of elevation and withdrawal with the impact of a living, breathing presence’ (in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 236). The present portrait seems to reflect Giacometti’s embrace of archaic expression, both in its general shape, which recalls the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti, circa 1340 BC, and the large, staring eyes that characterize his sculptures and paintings after 1960. Giacometti remarked, ‘The works of the past that I find the most true to reality are those that are considered the least, the furthest from it. [By that] I mean stylized art-Chaldea, Egypt, Byzantium, the Faiyûm, some Chinese things, Christian miniatures from the Middle Ages, and not at all what one calls realism’ (quoted in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, London, 2001, p. 211).
chin, out from the abstracted mass that is the supporting base of this work. Giacometti met Annette Arm while living in Geneva shortly after the Second World War. She accompanied him back to Paris in the Summer of 1946, posing for him each day for hours on end.
They eventually married in July 1949. While still in Switzerland, Giacometti introduced Annette to acquaintances such as the philosopher Jean Starobinski, who remarked that ‘She was a young woman who stood “facing you”, who watched, and spoke, and met life “head on,“ infinitely candid and infinitely reserved, in a wonderful frontality’ (quoted in V. Wiesinger, The Women of Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2000, p.18). Simone de Beauvoir similarly stated that she possessed a “gruff rationalism [and] boldness,” and further commented, ‘Her eyes devoured the world. She couldn’t stand missing anything or anyone; she liked violence and laughed about everything’ (quoted in V. Wiesinger, op. cit., 2000, p. 18.).
Giacometti’s portraits of Annette also demonstrate his assertion that sculpture should capture an essential quality of the sitter through an extreme measure of style rather than physiognomic verisimilitude. The art of past cultures, maintained the sculptor, could serve as a model for this endeavour. Commenting on Giacometti’s quest for realism, Christian Klemm has written: ‘Giacometti searched in all mediums for a new, more rigorous evocation of the ephemeral living model. The drawings, with the purity of their delineation, vividly demonstrate a canon of proportions that would seem to have been devised for eternity—and where Giacometti came ever closer to achieving the effect of Egyptian art. In painting, too, the lines that give the face and gaze their vibrancy achieved a new clarity. In sculpture, an immediately striking feature of the heads is the artist’s renewed interest in the pedestal and the very different forms it can take. Here, again, Giacometti sought to combine a moment of elevation and withdrawal with the impact of a living, breathing presence’ (in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 236). The present portrait seems to reflect Giacometti’s embrace of archaic expression, both in its general shape, which recalls the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti, circa 1340 BC, and the large, staring eyes that characterize his sculptures and paintings after 1960. Giacometti remarked, ‘The works of the past that I find the most true to reality are those that are considered the least, the furthest from it. [By that] I mean stylized art-Chaldea, Egypt, Byzantium, the Faiyûm, some Chinese things, Christian miniatures from the Middle Ages, and not at all what one calls realism’ (quoted in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, London, 2001, p. 211).