Le Couple

One of the first sculptures publicly exhibited by Alberto Giacometti in Paris, Le Couple is a bold testament to the artist’s highly experimental approach to the figure during the mid- to late-1920s. This was a pivotal moment in Giacometti’s artistic development, as he absorbed and synthesized the influences of art from Africa, Oceania, and pre-Archaic Europe, as well as Cubism and Surrealism, to reach a unique artistic idiom that propelled him to the forefront of the European avant-garde. The artist had moved to Paris at the age of twenty, to study sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Antoine Bourdelle. After years of struggling to capture his visual experiences accurately in his work, however, he took the decision in 1925 to “work at home from memory... This resulted... in objects which were for me as close as I could get to my vision of reality” (quoted in Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1996, p. 12). A key work from this innovative period, Le Couple explores the forms of a man and woman, standing together like a pair of totemic idols, their figures at once similar to one another, yet intrinsically different.
Created concurrently with the artist’s iconic Femme cuillère, Le Couple focuses on the masculine-feminine dichotomy, a theme that would occupy Giacometti endlessly throughout his career. Distilling the human form down to a collection of signs and essential, geometric shapes, Giacometti conjures a pair of ambiguous, archetypal visions of man and woman, juxtaposed side-by-side. The highly stylized figures can be read simultaneously as mask-like faces and representations of the full-length body, each detail suggesting both facial features—such as eyes, noses and mouths—and other aspects of the human form, such as breasts, hands and sexual organs. Executed in a curving, ellipsoid shape, the female character, for example, contains elements that may alternately be read as eyes or breasts, while the vertical almond detail towards the base suggests both a mouth and a vulva. This same shape is repeated in the male figure’s eye, a detail that introduces a degree of tension and voyeurism to the pairing—as Christian Klemm has explained: “like the chiasmic transposition of the sexual features of one into the eyes of the other, [this detail] indicates other dimensions of the figures’ sexuality” (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 2001, p. 62).
The sculpture reveals the impact of non-Western art on Giacometti’s bourgeoning style during the 1920s, particularly African and Oceanic sculptures. He was a frequent visitor of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro at this time, as well as the Musée des Antiquités nationales, both of which displayed a range of objects—including plaster casts of recent archaeological finds—from Africa, the Cyclades, and Pre-Columbian cultures. A number of the artist’s friends were also keen connoisseurs and collectors of non-Western artefacts and artworks, while periodicals such as L’Esprit nouveau and Cahiers d’art frequently included photographs and articles on the subject. In order to deepen his understanding and connection to these alternative conceptions of form and volume, Giacometti surrounded himself with a diverse array of imagery and objects in his studio on the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron. A photograph from 1927 sees the artist seated near a Kota Reliquary figure, which he had recently purchased from the artist Serge Brignoni, its powerful, angular form dominating the modest desk.
The exaggerated depictions of sexual attributes found in many of these ancient and non-Western works appear to have shaped Giacometti’s own preoccupation with the concept of “male” and “female” at this time, as he worked to reduce these roles to their most elemental and universal signifiers. In Le Couple, Giacometti deliberately places the two figures slightly apart on the rectangular base, introducing a palpable tension within the sculpture, deploying the negative space between their forms to emphasize both their connection to one another, and their inherent disparities. At the same time, the female figure leans ever so slightly towards the male, a subtle effect that animates the space further, perhaps suggesting the erotic pull and physical connection between the two. The present cast of Le Couple was acquired directly from Giacometti in 1958 by Pierre Matisse, before being purchased by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982, where it remained for almost thirty years before entering the collection of Leonard and Louise Riggio.