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Lot Essay
The Comité Giacometti confirms the authenticity of this sculpture. It will be included in the catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Foundation Alberto and Annette Giacometti.
The Association Alberto and Annette Giacometti has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In 1934, at the height of his engagement with surrealism, Giacometti felt compelled to model from life again. He worked on heads, using his brother Diego and a model named Rita Gueffier as sitters. This activity constituted a betrayal of the surrealist ethos, and called to account by Breton in early 1935, Giacometti walked out on the meeting. Giacometti later wrote, "I knew that one day I would be forced to sit down on a stool before a model and copy what I saw. And with no hope of succeeding. In a way I was afraid to have to start this again, but on the other hand it was unavoidable. I was afraid of it but I had hope. Because the abstract things I was doing then were at an end, once and for all" (in conversation with Pierre Schneider, 'Ma longue marche,' L'Express, Paris, no. 521, 8 June 1961, pp. 262-268).
Giacometti modeled from life by trial and error, and destroyed most of the pieces he made during the latter part of the 1930s. Two works which he appears to have considered a success, however, and thankfully saved, were the pair of heads of a young Englishwoman named Isabel Delmer (fig. 1). The first is the present work, which Giacometti modeled in 1936. It became known as L'egyptienne because of its serene expression, elegant profile and simplified mass of hair that resembles a nemes, the royal headdress of the Egyptians. The second head of Isabel, done in 1938-1939, was modeled more ruggedly, tracing Giacometti's movement from an idealized conception of his sitter to a more realistic one.
Giacometti's attachment to these sculptures no doubt owed much to the fact that Isabel became his great love interest during the late 1930s and into the next decade. He met Isabel in 1935, when she was 23 years old. She had been an art student in London, where she modeled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein. She moved to Paris in 1934, had a liaison with the painter André Derain, and then met the British journalist Sefton Delmer, whom she married. She was a lively and magnetic habitué of the café scene in Montparnasse. Picasso thought of making a pass at her during the time he was seeing Dora Maar, but contented himself with painting her from memory several times. One night Isabel caught Giacometti's attention from across the room. James Lord described her as being "Tall, lithe, superbly proportioned, she moved with the agility of a feline predator. Something exotic, suggesting obscure origins, was visible in her full mouth, high cheekbones, and heavy-lidded, slanting eyes from which shone forth a gaze of exceptional, though remote intensity" (in op. cit., p. 161)
This remoteness appealed to Giacometti, who felt most comfortable admiring her from a distance, and the story of their relationship is a series of tentative approaches, encounters and retreats. "It must have seemed at times that the distance and the relationship were the same thing" (ibid., p. 176). This aspect of their relationship became one of the key elements in Giacometti's art and eventually found expression in the tiny heads that he made during the war years, and the famous elongated figures thereafter. He told his friend Pierre Dumayet, "I had an English girlfriend, and the sculpture I wanted to make of this woman was exactly the vision I had had of her when I saw her in the street, some way off. So I tended to make her the size that she had seemed at this distance" (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., p. 272)
Isabel returned to London during the Second World War, where she divorced Delmer and married the British composer Constant Lambert, who had written scores for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Giacometti and Isabel resumed their liaison at the end of the war, but on Christmas evening, 1945, she left a party they were attending and walked off with the French avant-garde composer René Leibowitz, returning several days later to Giacometti's apartment to collect her belongings.
(fig. 1) Isabel Delmer during the 1930s. BARCODE 23662018
The Association Alberto and Annette Giacometti has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In 1934, at the height of his engagement with surrealism, Giacometti felt compelled to model from life again. He worked on heads, using his brother Diego and a model named Rita Gueffier as sitters. This activity constituted a betrayal of the surrealist ethos, and called to account by Breton in early 1935, Giacometti walked out on the meeting. Giacometti later wrote, "I knew that one day I would be forced to sit down on a stool before a model and copy what I saw. And with no hope of succeeding. In a way I was afraid to have to start this again, but on the other hand it was unavoidable. I was afraid of it but I had hope. Because the abstract things I was doing then were at an end, once and for all" (in conversation with Pierre Schneider, 'Ma longue marche,' L'Express, Paris, no. 521, 8 June 1961, pp. 262-268).
Giacometti modeled from life by trial and error, and destroyed most of the pieces he made during the latter part of the 1930s. Two works which he appears to have considered a success, however, and thankfully saved, were the pair of heads of a young Englishwoman named Isabel Delmer (fig. 1). The first is the present work, which Giacometti modeled in 1936. It became known as L'egyptienne because of its serene expression, elegant profile and simplified mass of hair that resembles a nemes, the royal headdress of the Egyptians. The second head of Isabel, done in 1938-1939, was modeled more ruggedly, tracing Giacometti's movement from an idealized conception of his sitter to a more realistic one.
Giacometti's attachment to these sculptures no doubt owed much to the fact that Isabel became his great love interest during the late 1930s and into the next decade. He met Isabel in 1935, when she was 23 years old. She had been an art student in London, where she modeled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein. She moved to Paris in 1934, had a liaison with the painter André Derain, and then met the British journalist Sefton Delmer, whom she married. She was a lively and magnetic habitué of the café scene in Montparnasse. Picasso thought of making a pass at her during the time he was seeing Dora Maar, but contented himself with painting her from memory several times. One night Isabel caught Giacometti's attention from across the room. James Lord described her as being "Tall, lithe, superbly proportioned, she moved with the agility of a feline predator. Something exotic, suggesting obscure origins, was visible in her full mouth, high cheekbones, and heavy-lidded, slanting eyes from which shone forth a gaze of exceptional, though remote intensity" (in op. cit., p. 161)
This remoteness appealed to Giacometti, who felt most comfortable admiring her from a distance, and the story of their relationship is a series of tentative approaches, encounters and retreats. "It must have seemed at times that the distance and the relationship were the same thing" (ibid., p. 176). This aspect of their relationship became one of the key elements in Giacometti's art and eventually found expression in the tiny heads that he made during the war years, and the famous elongated figures thereafter. He told his friend Pierre Dumayet, "I had an English girlfriend, and the sculpture I wanted to make of this woman was exactly the vision I had had of her when I saw her in the street, some way off. So I tended to make her the size that she had seemed at this distance" (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., p. 272)
Isabel returned to London during the Second World War, where she divorced Delmer and married the British composer Constant Lambert, who had written scores for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Giacometti and Isabel resumed their liaison at the end of the war, but on Christmas evening, 1945, she left a party they were attending and walked off with the French avant-garde composer René Leibowitz, returning several days later to Giacometti's apartment to collect her belongings.
(fig. 1) Isabel Delmer during the 1930s. BARCODE 23662018