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Lot Essay
Over the course of a two year period between 1948-1950, Alberto Giacometti created a series of multi-figure compositions that would prove to be among the most important developments in his oeuvre since the end of the Second World War. As explained by the artist’s biographer James Lord, this was a period of astonishing productivity for the artist, in which he honed the iconic vision for which he is now famed, and produced a string of masterpieces: “The years 1949 and 1950 were anni mirabiles for Giacometti, wonderful in the wealth, diversity, and mastery of works produced. One after another, the most extraordinary productions emerged from his studio” (Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1986, p. 303). Conceived in 1950 and cast before July 1952, the present Composition avec trois figures et une tête (La Place) is an early lifetime cast of one of the most intriguing works from this series of sculptures. Upon a rectangular base, three towering, elongated women of varying sizes stand facing the viewer, their forms thinned to the extreme, while the head of a male character appears towards the edge of the base, mysteriously sinking, as if it is about to disappear from view entirely.
Giacometti initially envisioned these multi-figure groupings as situated in une place, that is, the representation of encounters between figures in a particular setting or space. Suggesting the brief interactions between people within a cosmopolitan square, Composition avec trois figures et une tête (La Place) is the most restrained of three groupings composed on and integrated into these rectangular bases; the other two are Composition avec neuf figures, better known as La Clairière, and Composition avec sept figures et une tête (La Forêt). While the figures in La Clairière are exclusively female, in both the present work and La Forêt the presence of a male head adds a new dimension to the configuration, offering a striking visual counterpoint to the elongated women. In each of these works, by placing the figures within the set, defined space of the geometric base, Giacometti generates a palpable tension between the various characters, activating the negative space surrounding their forms and conjuring a sense of interaction and engagement between each of the figures. Here, the base suggests an urban context, the platform derived from the notion of the city square and the arrangement of the different figures indicating the way that city-dwellers pass without stopping, speaking, even seeing each other. Connected yet isolated, they offer a striking insight into the experience of life in the metropolis, reflecting contemporary commentary on the human condition during the post-war years of existentialism.
These sculptures made their debut at an exhibition dedicated to Giacometti’s recent work, staged in December 1950 at Pierre Matisse’s eponymous New York gallery. In contrast to the highlights of his previous show at the gallery—a landmark, breakthrough moment in Giacometti’s career, held in January 1947, which had featured large, sometimes life-size, and single attenuated figures and body parts—the multi-figure compositions were executed on a much smaller scale, yet contained a striking new complexity and tension. As the introduction to the 1950 exhibition catalogue, Matisse translated passages from a recent letter in which Giacometti explained the genesis of these new sculptures: “Every day during March and April 1950 I made three figures (studies) of different dimensions and also heads. I stopped without reaching what I was looking for but was unable to destroy these figures which were still standing up or to leave them isolated and lost in space. I started to make a composition of three figures and one head [La Place], a composition which came out almost against myself (or rather it was done before I had time to think about it)...” (quoted in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1950, pp. 5-6).
At first, Giacometti was concerned that the gap between these figures appeared too calculated, their placement too measured. The artist had not needed to deal with such issues in his sculptures since the mid-1930s when, at the end of his early surrealist period, he had ceased bringing together multiple elements in a work and turned instead to modeling solitary figures from life or memory. The solution to this problem, however, soon became apparent most unexpectedly, while working in his small studio: “A few days later, looking at other figures which, in order to clear the table, had been placed on the floor at random, I realized that they formed two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for. I set up the two groups without changing their positions and afterwards worked on the figures altering neither positions nor dimensions” (ibid., p. 6).
The thin, elongated figures which have since become so inextricably linked to Giacometti, were still a relatively new development in his work at this point—it was only in the years after the end of the War that he had begun to explore these filiform human sculptures. Following the end of his association with Surrealism, Giacometti had begun to create works that he hoped would be more readily legible than his more allusive works from the 1930s. Accordingly, he was making works based on the human figure in which he sought to capture the kernel of their existence; yet as Giacometti pared away the material, he found that his sculptures were shrinking to miniscule proportions. When he returned to Paris in September 1945, it is said that he was able to fit his entire war-time production, executed during a three-year exile in Switzerland, into just six small matchboxes.
At this juncture, Giacometti was unsure how to move forward with his figurative experiments, but promised himself that he would not let his figures decrease any further in size. It was a few months later, on a trip to a cinema in Montparnasse that Giacometti had the revelation he needed to progress, or as he described it in later years, the “shock which upset my whole conception of space and set me definitely travelling along my present path” (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., 1991, p. 298). Sitting in the cinema, he suddenly became acutely aware of the difference between the images conveyed in black and white on the screen and those experienced in real life, a feeling that was accentuated when he emerged into the bustling city streets after the film had ended. This irrevocably altered Giacometti’s sculptural practice, as he became fixated upon the reproduction of the reality that he could observe in front of him. This was not a mimetic, naturalistic reproduction of reality, however, but rather a portrayal or a distillation of human presence, and the artist’s highly personal perception of this. “What is important is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject,” he explained (quoted in J. Lord, op. cit., 1986, p. 279).
In Composition avec trois figures et une tête (La Place), Giacometti eschews any attempt at capturing the individual features of the women before him, reducing their forms to basic silhouettes. As a result, they appear as exceedingly thin, static, vertical shards of bronze, emphatic in their textured appearance, yet almost melting away within the surrounding space. Most importantly, they are rendered in deliberately discordant scales to one another, creating an impression of recession within the sculpture—indeed, it is as if they are standing at slightly different distances from the viewer, playing with our sense of perception and our appreciation of the surrounding space. Giacometti was fascinated by capturing such an impression in his sculptures, explaining that “If I look at a woman on the opposite pavement and I see her all small, I feel the wonder of a small figure walking in space, and then, seeing her smaller still, my field of vision becomes much larger. I see a vast space above and around that is almost limitless” (quoted in D. Honisch, “Scale in Giacometti’s Sculpture” in A. Schneider, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, London, 2008, p. 67).
Giacometti initially envisioned these multi-figure groupings as situated in une place, that is, the representation of encounters between figures in a particular setting or space. Suggesting the brief interactions between people within a cosmopolitan square, Composition avec trois figures et une tête (La Place) is the most restrained of three groupings composed on and integrated into these rectangular bases; the other two are Composition avec neuf figures, better known as La Clairière, and Composition avec sept figures et une tête (La Forêt). While the figures in La Clairière are exclusively female, in both the present work and La Forêt the presence of a male head adds a new dimension to the configuration, offering a striking visual counterpoint to the elongated women. In each of these works, by placing the figures within the set, defined space of the geometric base, Giacometti generates a palpable tension between the various characters, activating the negative space surrounding their forms and conjuring a sense of interaction and engagement between each of the figures. Here, the base suggests an urban context, the platform derived from the notion of the city square and the arrangement of the different figures indicating the way that city-dwellers pass without stopping, speaking, even seeing each other. Connected yet isolated, they offer a striking insight into the experience of life in the metropolis, reflecting contemporary commentary on the human condition during the post-war years of existentialism.
These sculptures made their debut at an exhibition dedicated to Giacometti’s recent work, staged in December 1950 at Pierre Matisse’s eponymous New York gallery. In contrast to the highlights of his previous show at the gallery—a landmark, breakthrough moment in Giacometti’s career, held in January 1947, which had featured large, sometimes life-size, and single attenuated figures and body parts—the multi-figure compositions were executed on a much smaller scale, yet contained a striking new complexity and tension. As the introduction to the 1950 exhibition catalogue, Matisse translated passages from a recent letter in which Giacometti explained the genesis of these new sculptures: “Every day during March and April 1950 I made three figures (studies) of different dimensions and also heads. I stopped without reaching what I was looking for but was unable to destroy these figures which were still standing up or to leave them isolated and lost in space. I started to make a composition of three figures and one head [La Place], a composition which came out almost against myself (or rather it was done before I had time to think about it)...” (quoted in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1950, pp. 5-6).
At first, Giacometti was concerned that the gap between these figures appeared too calculated, their placement too measured. The artist had not needed to deal with such issues in his sculptures since the mid-1930s when, at the end of his early surrealist period, he had ceased bringing together multiple elements in a work and turned instead to modeling solitary figures from life or memory. The solution to this problem, however, soon became apparent most unexpectedly, while working in his small studio: “A few days later, looking at other figures which, in order to clear the table, had been placed on the floor at random, I realized that they formed two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for. I set up the two groups without changing their positions and afterwards worked on the figures altering neither positions nor dimensions” (ibid., p. 6).
The thin, elongated figures which have since become so inextricably linked to Giacometti, were still a relatively new development in his work at this point—it was only in the years after the end of the War that he had begun to explore these filiform human sculptures. Following the end of his association with Surrealism, Giacometti had begun to create works that he hoped would be more readily legible than his more allusive works from the 1930s. Accordingly, he was making works based on the human figure in which he sought to capture the kernel of their existence; yet as Giacometti pared away the material, he found that his sculptures were shrinking to miniscule proportions. When he returned to Paris in September 1945, it is said that he was able to fit his entire war-time production, executed during a three-year exile in Switzerland, into just six small matchboxes.
At this juncture, Giacometti was unsure how to move forward with his figurative experiments, but promised himself that he would not let his figures decrease any further in size. It was a few months later, on a trip to a cinema in Montparnasse that Giacometti had the revelation he needed to progress, or as he described it in later years, the “shock which upset my whole conception of space and set me definitely travelling along my present path” (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., 1991, p. 298). Sitting in the cinema, he suddenly became acutely aware of the difference between the images conveyed in black and white on the screen and those experienced in real life, a feeling that was accentuated when he emerged into the bustling city streets after the film had ended. This irrevocably altered Giacometti’s sculptural practice, as he became fixated upon the reproduction of the reality that he could observe in front of him. This was not a mimetic, naturalistic reproduction of reality, however, but rather a portrayal or a distillation of human presence, and the artist’s highly personal perception of this. “What is important is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject,” he explained (quoted in J. Lord, op. cit., 1986, p. 279).
In Composition avec trois figures et une tête (La Place), Giacometti eschews any attempt at capturing the individual features of the women before him, reducing their forms to basic silhouettes. As a result, they appear as exceedingly thin, static, vertical shards of bronze, emphatic in their textured appearance, yet almost melting away within the surrounding space. Most importantly, they are rendered in deliberately discordant scales to one another, creating an impression of recession within the sculpture—indeed, it is as if they are standing at slightly different distances from the viewer, playing with our sense of perception and our appreciation of the surrounding space. Giacometti was fascinated by capturing such an impression in his sculptures, explaining that “If I look at a woman on the opposite pavement and I see her all small, I feel the wonder of a small figure walking in space, and then, seeing her smaller still, my field of vision becomes much larger. I see a vast space above and around that is almost limitless” (quoted in D. Honisch, “Scale in Giacometti’s Sculpture” in A. Schneider, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, London, 2008, p. 67).