拍品专文
The majority of Alberto Giacometti's numerous portrait heads are indirectly portraits of his brother Diego. "He posed for me over a longer period of time and more often than anyone else...So when I draw or sculpt or paint a head from memory, it always turns out to be more or less Diego's because it's Diego's head I've done most often from life." (Exhibition catalogue, Twentieth Century Modern Masters, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, New York and London, 1989-90, p. 261).
Many of Giacometti's figure paintings show the perspectival focus in the centre of the figure's head, usually the eyes which stare straight out at the viewer, as exemplified in the present painting. He developed this emphasis on the gaze at an early date. Giacometti believed that the direct gaze was essential to his figurative works and he felt that only through this device could he convey the vitality and reality of his sitters. He also began incorporating painted frames around nearly all his portraits at an early stage, but it became almost standard after 1946. "Recalling the Renaissance definition of a painting as a window on the world, this framing device opens up and encloses an imaginary three-dimensional reality. By isolating the figure in a remote and uncertain environment, Giacometti marks off the figure's space as distinct from our reality. When asked why he used these framing outlines, he replied: "Because I do not determine the true space of the figure until after it is finished. And with the vague intention of reducing the canvas, I try to fictionalize my painting...And also because my figures need a sort of no man's land"." (V. J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, London, 1988, p. 48).
"More than any other pictorial component, line defines and dominates Giacometti's post-war style...Influenced in part by his own drawings from the 1940s, he used a thin brush like a pencil to draw lines repeatedly over, inside and around the forms, defining without actually describing them, creating and simultaneously annihilating solid mass on the surface of the flat canvas...Spatial environment, descriptive form, colour, movement and texture exist within his lines or as deliberate foils to them. Within a few short years he developed a linear style of breathtaking variety and virtuosity." (op. cit., p. 48).
Many of Giacometti's figure paintings show the perspectival focus in the centre of the figure's head, usually the eyes which stare straight out at the viewer, as exemplified in the present painting. He developed this emphasis on the gaze at an early date. Giacometti believed that the direct gaze was essential to his figurative works and he felt that only through this device could he convey the vitality and reality of his sitters. He also began incorporating painted frames around nearly all his portraits at an early stage, but it became almost standard after 1946. "Recalling the Renaissance definition of a painting as a window on the world, this framing device opens up and encloses an imaginary three-dimensional reality. By isolating the figure in a remote and uncertain environment, Giacometti marks off the figure's space as distinct from our reality. When asked why he used these framing outlines, he replied: "Because I do not determine the true space of the figure until after it is finished. And with the vague intention of reducing the canvas, I try to fictionalize my painting...And also because my figures need a sort of no man's land"." (V. J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, London, 1988, p. 48).
"More than any other pictorial component, line defines and dominates Giacometti's post-war style...Influenced in part by his own drawings from the 1940s, he used a thin brush like a pencil to draw lines repeatedly over, inside and around the forms, defining without actually describing them, creating and simultaneously annihilating solid mass on the surface of the flat canvas...Spatial environment, descriptive form, colour, movement and texture exist within his lines or as deliberate foils to them. Within a few short years he developed a linear style of breathtaking variety and virtuosity." (op. cit., p. 48).