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Lot Essay
The Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation will include this work in their forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Alberto Giacometti.
The Association Alberto and Annette Giacometti has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Giacometti painted this portrait of his mother Annetta in 1947. The same year that he began to sculpt elongated figures in his iconic, visionary manner. He showed these sculptures the following year in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. This landmark event established Giacometti's international reputation as one of the leading sculptors in the immediate post-war period.
Giacometti returned to painting and drawing from life in 1934, a move that precipitated his break with André Breton and the Surrealists. He was attracted to the figurative paintings of André Derain and Jean Hélion, and among a younger generation of artists, Balthus, Francis Gruber, Pierre Tal Coat and Francis Tailleux. Two years later he painted two important pictures at his family home in Stampa, the first, a still-life of a single apple set on a large sideboard, and the second, a portrait of his mother. The latter, in fact, was erroneously dated 1945 when it was shown at the 1948 Pierre Matisse Gallery exhibition. Both paintings show the influence of Cézanne, whose work Giacometti had seen in retrospective exhibitions held in Paris and Basel during the summer of 1936. Christian Klemm has written, "As though conducting a phenomenological exploration, Giacometti did not naively seek to transfer reality directly on to canvas, but to realize the picture of reality held within his inner perception. The internal frame that began to emerge in both of these paintings became an important feature of this reflective realism. Thus, as in Surrealism, an inner picture is shown, the difference being there is no longer a dreamlike fiction but the artist's perception of reality" (in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 120).
Giacometti spent the Second World War in Geneva, where he modeled heads and figures so tiny that they fit into a half-dozen matchboxes when he transported them to his Paris studio at the end of the war in 1945. There, he continued making miniscule works, and then began to enlarge them. Meanwhile, he was continually drawing, and he then began to paint again, taking as his subjects a few friends (but most frequently his brother Diego, his new companion Annette Harms, both of whom he painted in his Paris studio) and his mother, who sat for him in Stampa. "Throughout his life," James Lord wrote, his vision of [his mother] had repeatedly been the affirmation of reality" (in Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1983, pp. 512-513). The present painting shows the same wraithlike attenuation of the face seen in concurrent modeled heads and figures. David Sylvester has written, "In the paintings, space is like a cloudy heavy liquid that is seen no less than the mass at the heart of it is seen, and is hardly less tangible. The mass has an energy that is turned inward upon itself, violently compressed around a central core, so that it seems to have a highly concentrated density. There is either outline or a multiplicity of outlines in the paintings to mark the transition space to mass" (in Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, pp. 22-23).
The sitter's small head as seen in this portrait, and her mountainous upper body, prefigure the essential elements of next stage in Giacometti's sculpture, which began in the early 1950s with the celebrated busts of Diego (see Christie's, New York, Evening Sale, 1 November 2005, lot 54). Giacometti's drawing and portrait painting during the late 1940s paved the way for this new approach of realizing the image and likeness of an individual figure in space. Yves Bonnefoy has observed:
It is already surprising enough to find an artist at the height of his powers, who in the space of three or four years had sculpted some of the major archetypes of modern art and was immediately recognized as such, practically abandoning this type of creation in order to devote himself to the portraits of a few individuals. But even more surprising and significant is the fact that during this final period, of almost fifteen years, the 'heads' studied were exclusively those of Diego, Annette, Annetta, Caroline and a few other persons, all close friends, which proves that Giacometti had indeed chosen the existence of individuals, the here and now as the chief object of his new and future study. (in Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 369)
The Association Alberto and Annette Giacometti has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Giacometti painted this portrait of his mother Annetta in 1947. The same year that he began to sculpt elongated figures in his iconic, visionary manner. He showed these sculptures the following year in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. This landmark event established Giacometti's international reputation as one of the leading sculptors in the immediate post-war period.
Giacometti returned to painting and drawing from life in 1934, a move that precipitated his break with André Breton and the Surrealists. He was attracted to the figurative paintings of André Derain and Jean Hélion, and among a younger generation of artists, Balthus, Francis Gruber, Pierre Tal Coat and Francis Tailleux. Two years later he painted two important pictures at his family home in Stampa, the first, a still-life of a single apple set on a large sideboard, and the second, a portrait of his mother. The latter, in fact, was erroneously dated 1945 when it was shown at the 1948 Pierre Matisse Gallery exhibition. Both paintings show the influence of Cézanne, whose work Giacometti had seen in retrospective exhibitions held in Paris and Basel during the summer of 1936. Christian Klemm has written, "As though conducting a phenomenological exploration, Giacometti did not naively seek to transfer reality directly on to canvas, but to realize the picture of reality held within his inner perception. The internal frame that began to emerge in both of these paintings became an important feature of this reflective realism. Thus, as in Surrealism, an inner picture is shown, the difference being there is no longer a dreamlike fiction but the artist's perception of reality" (in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 120).
Giacometti spent the Second World War in Geneva, where he modeled heads and figures so tiny that they fit into a half-dozen matchboxes when he transported them to his Paris studio at the end of the war in 1945. There, he continued making miniscule works, and then began to enlarge them. Meanwhile, he was continually drawing, and he then began to paint again, taking as his subjects a few friends (but most frequently his brother Diego, his new companion Annette Harms, both of whom he painted in his Paris studio) and his mother, who sat for him in Stampa. "Throughout his life," James Lord wrote, his vision of [his mother] had repeatedly been the affirmation of reality" (in Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1983, pp. 512-513). The present painting shows the same wraithlike attenuation of the face seen in concurrent modeled heads and figures. David Sylvester has written, "In the paintings, space is like a cloudy heavy liquid that is seen no less than the mass at the heart of it is seen, and is hardly less tangible. The mass has an energy that is turned inward upon itself, violently compressed around a central core, so that it seems to have a highly concentrated density. There is either outline or a multiplicity of outlines in the paintings to mark the transition space to mass" (in Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, pp. 22-23).
The sitter's small head as seen in this portrait, and her mountainous upper body, prefigure the essential elements of next stage in Giacometti's sculpture, which began in the early 1950s with the celebrated busts of Diego (see Christie's, New York, Evening Sale, 1 November 2005, lot 54). Giacometti's drawing and portrait painting during the late 1940s paved the way for this new approach of realizing the image and likeness of an individual figure in space. Yves Bonnefoy has observed:
It is already surprising enough to find an artist at the height of his powers, who in the space of three or four years had sculpted some of the major archetypes of modern art and was immediately recognized as such, practically abandoning this type of creation in order to devote himself to the portraits of a few individuals. But even more surprising and significant is the fact that during this final period, of almost fifteen years, the 'heads' studied were exclusively those of Diego, Annette, Annetta, Caroline and a few other persons, all close friends, which proves that Giacometti had indeed chosen the existence of individuals, the here and now as the chief object of his new and future study. (in Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 369)