Lot Essay
The present painting was executed by Alberto Giacometti during one of his annual visits to his native Switzerland. Here in Maloja, a few miles up the valley from Stampa, the artist presents us with the view from his family's summer house. The mountain across the Lac de Sils forms the focal point of the scene, while the roof of the Giacometti home is represented by a triangle in the painting's top left corner. The artist adopts the same vantage point in a 1957 pencil drawing of Maloja currently in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (fig. 1).
Although the overall tone of the present painting is grey, it is in fact constructed from a delicate combination of pale colors -- light blue, sea green and soft pink -- united by strong black lines. According to Yves Bonnefoy, Giacometti had difficulty addressing color and construction at the same time. Although he loved color, he found it problematic to work with; on the other hand, he felt immediately impelled towards construction.
"I dream of light colours," [Giacometti] said, "but can not manage to put them on my canvas... I remember a spring morning at Stampa, everything was so pretty and green. I started painting a landscape, with those pretty trees. But as soon as I come up against the structure of the smallest branch -- it is goodbye to the pretty flowers!"
...Giacometti does not achieve 'perfect blackness' but, on the contrary, ends with a pure experience of light. True, colour is lacking, mountain tops and trees are formed of just a network of lines, which the painter could have drawn with a less aggressive, less provocative black. But a pink tinge on the mountain, a touch of orange on the ground are enough to introduce something other-worldly, infinitely radiant, into the grey tinged with blue or mauve which underlies those black lines. Indeed, the spiritual reality of this light is all the more evident because the painter emphasizes its precarious nature.
Giacometti's landscapes have little colour, but they by no means lack light, as do those of so many other, even sensitive, painters. It is more accurate to say that they perceive, that they indicate a faint, distant light, and this is reminiscent of a stained-glass window, where the black tracery of the lead serves as a metaphor for that which, either in their life or in the natural world, debars those who most desire an access to the divine. (Y. Bonnefoy,
Giacometti, Paris, 1991, pp. 468, 476-477)
(fig. 1) Alberto Giacometti, Paysage à Maloja, 1957
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Although the overall tone of the present painting is grey, it is in fact constructed from a delicate combination of pale colors -- light blue, sea green and soft pink -- united by strong black lines. According to Yves Bonnefoy, Giacometti had difficulty addressing color and construction at the same time. Although he loved color, he found it problematic to work with; on the other hand, he felt immediately impelled towards construction.
"I dream of light colours," [Giacometti] said, "but can not manage to put them on my canvas... I remember a spring morning at Stampa, everything was so pretty and green. I started painting a landscape, with those pretty trees. But as soon as I come up against the structure of the smallest branch -- it is goodbye to the pretty flowers!"
...Giacometti does not achieve 'perfect blackness' but, on the contrary, ends with a pure experience of light. True, colour is lacking, mountain tops and trees are formed of just a network of lines, which the painter could have drawn with a less aggressive, less provocative black. But a pink tinge on the mountain, a touch of orange on the ground are enough to introduce something other-worldly, infinitely radiant, into the grey tinged with blue or mauve which underlies those black lines. Indeed, the spiritual reality of this light is all the more evident because the painter emphasizes its precarious nature.
Giacometti's landscapes have little colour, but they by no means lack light, as do those of so many other, even sensitive, painters. It is more accurate to say that they perceive, that they indicate a faint, distant light, and this is reminiscent of a stained-glass window, where the black tracery of the lead serves as a metaphor for that which, either in their life or in the natural world, debars those who most desire an access to the divine. (Y. Bonnefoy,
Giacometti, Paris, 1991, pp. 468, 476-477)
(fig. 1) Alberto Giacometti, Paysage à Maloja, 1957
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York