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拍品專文
By 1950, Giacometti felt that he had exhausted the possibilities inherent in the attenuated, stick-like figures that he made in his visionary, weightless style of the late 1940s. He now sought to reclaim a more realistic and concrete sense of space, without sacrificing the acute degree of expressivity that he had worked so hard for nearly three decades to achieve. Just as he had done in 1935, when he gave up his surrealist and abstract manner, Giacometti once again committed himself to working from a model, this time his wife Annette or more often his brother Diego. The resumption of this practice in his studio heralded a sea-change in his art. "And this is the point that must be stressed," Yves Bonnefoy has explained, "it is already surprising enough to find an artist at the height of his powers, who in the space of three or four years had sculpted some of the major archetypes of modern art and was immediately recognized as such, practically abandoning this type of creation in order to devote himself to the portraits of a few individuals...During this final period, of almost fifteen years, the heads studies were exclusively Diego, Annette, Annetta [the artist's mother], Caroline and a very few other persons, all close friends, which proves that Giacometti had indeed chosen the existence of individuals, the here and now as the chief object of his new and future study; and he instinctively realized that this object transcended all artistic signs and representations, since it was no less than life itself" (Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 2012, p. 369).
In the present work, Giacometti makes the rare decision to study himself as opposed to his close companions. While as a youth Giacometti had drawn and painted several self-portraits, after World War II he rarely depicted himself. The present Autoportrait is based upon Irving Penn’s photograph of the artist from 1950 (fig. 1). The practice of drawing after reproductions was a habit that stayed with Giacometti from childhood until the last years of his life, as he believed that drawing from an object was the definitive artistic discipline. The Penn photograph allowed Giacometti the opportunity to study his own face while drawing, in much the same way that he could study those who patiently sat for him and the reproductions of artworks he copied—without the interruption of a moving image, as would have been the case had he tried to depict himself while looking in the mirror. Giacometti was therefore able to treat himself as object, as still life, distancing himself from his own image in order to objectively capture every detail. Jacques Dupin describes the artist’s method, which applies even to his own self-portrait: “Each thing and each human being, untiringly questioned with that intensity that Giacometti puts into each gesture and each look, became the unknown, the pre-eminently unknown, and the object of an infinite approach, a renewed astonishment, an inexhaustible quest” (Giacometti: Three Essays, New York, 2003, p. 77).
In the present work, Giacometti makes the rare decision to study himself as opposed to his close companions. While as a youth Giacometti had drawn and painted several self-portraits, after World War II he rarely depicted himself. The present Autoportrait is based upon Irving Penn’s photograph of the artist from 1950 (fig. 1). The practice of drawing after reproductions was a habit that stayed with Giacometti from childhood until the last years of his life, as he believed that drawing from an object was the definitive artistic discipline. The Penn photograph allowed Giacometti the opportunity to study his own face while drawing, in much the same way that he could study those who patiently sat for him and the reproductions of artworks he copied—without the interruption of a moving image, as would have been the case had he tried to depict himself while looking in the mirror. Giacometti was therefore able to treat himself as object, as still life, distancing himself from his own image in order to objectively capture every detail. Jacques Dupin describes the artist’s method, which applies even to his own self-portrait: “Each thing and each human being, untiringly questioned with that intensity that Giacometti puts into each gesture and each look, became the unknown, the pre-eminently unknown, and the object of an infinite approach, a renewed astonishment, an inexhaustible quest” (Giacometti: Three Essays, New York, 2003, p. 77).