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拍品专文
In Nu dans l’atelier (Annette) Alberto Giacometti focuses on the elegant, nude form of his young wife Annette, seated amid the clutter and paraphernalia of the artist’s legendary Parisian studio. While Giacometti had explored painting in his youth, it was not until his return to Paris following the end of the Second World War that he fully embraced the practice, immersing himself once again in the interplay of color and form on canvas, which paralleled his explorations and studies of the human figure in drawing and sculpture. This shift coincided with Giacometti’s renewed interest in working from life, which underpinned his art of the early 1950s, bringing with it a heightened sense of observation. To this end, the artist chose to depict a few individuals repeatedly—Annette, his brother Diego, and some close friends—to study their essential human presence, and “to create,” as Giacometti stated, “a complete whole all at once” (quoted in J. Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, New York, 1965, p. 59).
Giacometti had first met Annette Arm in 1943 in Geneva, and was immediately captivated by the intensity and directness of her gaze, as well as her frank and open manner. Widely known for her charm, Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that Annette’s “eyes devoured the world. She couldn’t stand missing anything, or anyone” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 19). Following the end of the War, Annette followed Giacometti back to Paris and quickly became one of the most important inspirations for his work, her constant presence allowing him to study her features and form intensively. In the present painting, Annette occupies a corner of the workroom that served as Giacometti’s studio for decades, situated at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in Montparnasse. Affectionately nicknamed “the cave,” the artist had moved into the space in December 1926, and though it had no running water, a rough concrete floor and a roof that leaked, it became the primary site of his artistic activity for the following forty years. “It’s funny, when I took this studio... I thought it was tiny...” Giacometti recalled. “But the longer I stayed, the bigger it became. I could fit anything I wanted into it” (quoted in L. Fritsch and F. Morris, eds., Giacometti, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2017, p. 105).
Most likely entering from the room she shared with Giacometti just off the main work space, Annette would have taken her position in a chair whose legs were placed on red marks on the floor, while the artist sat on a stool before his easel a short distance away, similarly marked off to preserve the precise distance between the painter and his sitter. In the upper right-hand corner of the composition, the ascending diagonal of the stairway that led from the studio to the second floor mezzanine is glimpsed in a network of lines, while below a series of brief brushstrokes trace the outlines of shelves and cupboards, as well as stacks of canvases leaning against the walls and mysterious, almost spectral, objects scattered across the floor.
The studio had a near archaeological character to it, with walls covered in sketches of Giacometti’s ideas, drawings and paintings, a ceiling riddled with holes and surfaces covered with dust, clay and plaster. When the artist Françoise Gilot visited the space, she recalled: “I was struck by the degree to which the physical aspect of the place recalled Giacometti’s painting. The wooden walls seemed impregnated with the color of clay, almost to the point of being made out of clay. We were at the center of a world completely created by Giacometti... There was never the slightest color accent anywhere to interfere with the endless uniform gray that covered everything” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, London, 1964, pp. 204-205). The subtle tones that dominate Nu dans l’atelier (Annette) offer a clear impression of the extent to which Giacometti’s pictures and his universe bled into one another during this period. However, although the palette is dominated by layers of gray, white, ochres, browns and grisaille, there are flashes of brilliant color among the quickly rendered strokes of paint, especially red, their presence adding an electric jolt to the picture’s surface, and drawing the eye.
Annette’s slender figure appears to coalesce before our eyes from a loose filigree of linear brushstrokes which both construct and model her presence on the canvas in an unrelenting accretion and layering of contours and pentimenti. The lines seem to follow the path of the eye as it might visualize the subject, the more salient aspects of her features receiving repeated working from the brush, with certain elements heightened with whitish paint to further emphasize their effect. The resulting build-up of pigment on the surface of the canvas calls attention to Giacometti’s use of paint as matière, as a substance with a physical presence in its own right. His deliberate softening of the paint in the area around the figure, meanwhile, creates a vague, halo-like appearance, offering a subtle contrast to the densely-layered network of brushwork that comprises Annette’s form, throwing her into relief against her surroundings.
At some point in the progress of the picture Giacometti added an internal frame, a few inches inside the periphery of the canvas edges. As Valerie Fletcher has explained, the purpose of this pictorial device was to locate the figure firmly within the space the artist had created within the composition: “Giacometti usually painted a linear frame around the subject of each painting, after the motif was established, to determine the final proportion of the figure to its environment. By painting a frame around the figure he controlled the effect of what might be termed ‘being in space’… The framing device creates a subliminal tension between illusion and reality, or rather between Giacometti’s reality and the canvas reality” (The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2007, pp. 187-188). To the left and right of the figure in Nu dans l’atelier (Annette), Giacometti adds touches of a paler gray paint within this boundary, partially concealing a series of tack-holes that run along both edges, which suggest he adjusted the size of the canvas as he worked on it.
The overall effect foregrounds Giacometti’s presence within the creation of the work—the frame places the viewer in the painter’s own shoes, as he studied, absorbed and translated Annette’s familiar form onto canvas, revealing his subjective experience of seeing whilst producing the final image. As Christian Klemm has noted, “it was the essential presence of the human being, as it appears to the artist, that he sought to grasp—the ceaseless dialogue between seeing and the seen, eye and hand, in which form continually grows and dissolves” (Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 222).
Giacometti had first met Annette Arm in 1943 in Geneva, and was immediately captivated by the intensity and directness of her gaze, as well as her frank and open manner. Widely known for her charm, Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that Annette’s “eyes devoured the world. She couldn’t stand missing anything, or anyone” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2005, p. 19). Following the end of the War, Annette followed Giacometti back to Paris and quickly became one of the most important inspirations for his work, her constant presence allowing him to study her features and form intensively. In the present painting, Annette occupies a corner of the workroom that served as Giacometti’s studio for decades, situated at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in Montparnasse. Affectionately nicknamed “the cave,” the artist had moved into the space in December 1926, and though it had no running water, a rough concrete floor and a roof that leaked, it became the primary site of his artistic activity for the following forty years. “It’s funny, when I took this studio... I thought it was tiny...” Giacometti recalled. “But the longer I stayed, the bigger it became. I could fit anything I wanted into it” (quoted in L. Fritsch and F. Morris, eds., Giacometti, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2017, p. 105).
Most likely entering from the room she shared with Giacometti just off the main work space, Annette would have taken her position in a chair whose legs were placed on red marks on the floor, while the artist sat on a stool before his easel a short distance away, similarly marked off to preserve the precise distance between the painter and his sitter. In the upper right-hand corner of the composition, the ascending diagonal of the stairway that led from the studio to the second floor mezzanine is glimpsed in a network of lines, while below a series of brief brushstrokes trace the outlines of shelves and cupboards, as well as stacks of canvases leaning against the walls and mysterious, almost spectral, objects scattered across the floor.
The studio had a near archaeological character to it, with walls covered in sketches of Giacometti’s ideas, drawings and paintings, a ceiling riddled with holes and surfaces covered with dust, clay and plaster. When the artist Françoise Gilot visited the space, she recalled: “I was struck by the degree to which the physical aspect of the place recalled Giacometti’s painting. The wooden walls seemed impregnated with the color of clay, almost to the point of being made out of clay. We were at the center of a world completely created by Giacometti... There was never the slightest color accent anywhere to interfere with the endless uniform gray that covered everything” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, London, 1964, pp. 204-205). The subtle tones that dominate Nu dans l’atelier (Annette) offer a clear impression of the extent to which Giacometti’s pictures and his universe bled into one another during this period. However, although the palette is dominated by layers of gray, white, ochres, browns and grisaille, there are flashes of brilliant color among the quickly rendered strokes of paint, especially red, their presence adding an electric jolt to the picture’s surface, and drawing the eye.
Annette’s slender figure appears to coalesce before our eyes from a loose filigree of linear brushstrokes which both construct and model her presence on the canvas in an unrelenting accretion and layering of contours and pentimenti. The lines seem to follow the path of the eye as it might visualize the subject, the more salient aspects of her features receiving repeated working from the brush, with certain elements heightened with whitish paint to further emphasize their effect. The resulting build-up of pigment on the surface of the canvas calls attention to Giacometti’s use of paint as matière, as a substance with a physical presence in its own right. His deliberate softening of the paint in the area around the figure, meanwhile, creates a vague, halo-like appearance, offering a subtle contrast to the densely-layered network of brushwork that comprises Annette’s form, throwing her into relief against her surroundings.
At some point in the progress of the picture Giacometti added an internal frame, a few inches inside the periphery of the canvas edges. As Valerie Fletcher has explained, the purpose of this pictorial device was to locate the figure firmly within the space the artist had created within the composition: “Giacometti usually painted a linear frame around the subject of each painting, after the motif was established, to determine the final proportion of the figure to its environment. By painting a frame around the figure he controlled the effect of what might be termed ‘being in space’… The framing device creates a subliminal tension between illusion and reality, or rather between Giacometti’s reality and the canvas reality” (The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2007, pp. 187-188). To the left and right of the figure in Nu dans l’atelier (Annette), Giacometti adds touches of a paler gray paint within this boundary, partially concealing a series of tack-holes that run along both edges, which suggest he adjusted the size of the canvas as he worked on it.
The overall effect foregrounds Giacometti’s presence within the creation of the work—the frame places the viewer in the painter’s own shoes, as he studied, absorbed and translated Annette’s familiar form onto canvas, revealing his subjective experience of seeing whilst producing the final image. As Christian Klemm has noted, “it was the essential presence of the human being, as it appears to the artist, that he sought to grasp—the ceaseless dialogue between seeing and the seen, eye and hand, in which form continually grows and dissolves” (Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, p. 222).