Annette assise dans l’atelier

Giacometti captured his fascination with the complexities of portraiture in this exquisite drawing of his wife Annette. Drawn in 1954 while visiting his family in Stampa, this work depicts Annette seated frontally in an unassuming posture that belies the intensity of her stare. Giacometti endeavored to record the shifting perceptions that arise from evoking a human presence in this personal yet distanced depiction of his wife in his studio.
Giacometti met Annette Arm while living in Geneva after the Second World War. She accompanied the artist back to Paris in the summer of 1946, and they were soon married in July 1949. Annette left an indelible mark on Giacometti’s oeuvre as one of his foremost sources of inspiration, posing for him almost daily in the 1950s and until his death in 1966. While still in Switzerland, Giacometti introduced Annette to 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., PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, 2005, p. 18). Annette—muse, model and wife—is featured prominently in Giacometti’s art in the early years of their marriage as the artist probed the technical limitations of art to capture the essence of the sitter.
The psychological power of this drawing lies in the tension between the intimate nature of this encounter and the imposed distance between artist and sitter. Giacometti breathed life into Annette through a dynamic use of line to articulate the sculptural quality of her figure against the recessive depth of the interior setting. Through a complex layering of intersecting lines, the artist articulated the contours of Annette’s form and face, endowing the figure with a concrete sense of volume. “Everything is a sphere, a cone, or a cylinder—it’s true,” Giacometti would say (quoted in H. and M. Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 1987, p. 214). While Annette remained the work's focus, the artist employed scale to create distance between model and viewer. Framed by the doorway on the far wall and flanked on either side by studio furniture, Annette appears dwarfed by the height of the ceiling above her. The large scale of the present lot also serves to draw the viewer into this private interior scene, as if watching the artistic process unfold.