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Alberto Giacometti
A Retrospective Exhibition
This exhibition is made possible
by a grant from Alcoa Foundation,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The exhibition is further aided by
a grant from Pro Helvetia Foundation,
Zurich, Switzerland
The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum,
New York
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Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1974
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 74-77334
© The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1974
Printed in the United States
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
PRESIDENT
TRUSTEES
Peter O. Lawson-Johnston
H. H. Arnason, Eleanor Countess Castle Stewart,
Joseph W. Donner, Mason Welch Gross, Frank R. Milliken,
Henry Allen Moe, A. Chauncey Newlin, Mrs. Henry Obre,
Daniel Catton Rich, Albert E. Thiele, Michael F. Wettach,
Carl Zigrosser.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
DIRECTOR
STAFF
Thomas M. Messer
Henry Berg, Deputy Director; Linda Konheim, Administrative Officer;
Agnes R. Connolly, Auditor; Susan L. Halper, Administrative Assistant;
Vanessa Jalet, Secretary to the Director.
Louise Averill Svendsen, Curator; Diane Waldman, Curator of Exhibitions;
Margit Rowell, Curator of Special Exhibitions; Carol Fuerstein, Editor;
Linda Shearer, Research Fellow; Mary Joan Hall, Librarian;
Ward Jackson, Archivist; Cheryl McClenney, Sabine Rewald, Coordinators.
Orrin Riley, Conservator; Lucy Belloli, Assistant Conservator;
Saul Fuerstein, Preparator; Robert E. Mates, Photographer;
Susan Lazarus, Assistant Photographer; David Roger Anthony, Registrar;
Elizabeth M. Funghini, Cherie A. Summers, Assistant Registrars;
Dana Cranmer, Technical Manager.
Anne B. Grausam, Public Affairs Officer; Miriam Emden, Members'
Representative; Darrie Hammer, Information; Carolyn Porcelli, Coordinator.
Peter G. Loggin, Building Superintendent; Guy Fletcher, Jr.,
Assistant Building Superintendent; Charles F. Banach, Head Guard.
Lenders to the Exhibition
Julian J. Aberbach
Acquavella, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Keith Barish
Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred P. Cohen
Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Cummings
William N. Eisendrath, Jr.
Robert Elkon
Annette Giacometti
Bruno Giacometti
Henriette Gomes
The Kittay Collection
Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Liberman
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Lust
Aime Maeght, Paris
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Matter, New York
The Penrose Collection, London
PepsiCo., Inc., Purchase, New York
Frank Perls, Beverly Hills, California
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee, New Jersey
Reader's Digest Association, Pleasantville, New York
John Rewald, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Howard Sloan, New York
Mrs. Bertram Smith
Dr. Eugene A. Solow
Sheldon H. Solow
Mrs. Lydia Thalmann-Amiet, Oschwand BE, Switzerland
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Zimmerman
The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Alberto Giacometti Foundation
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Milwaukee Art Center
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Art
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
Galerie Beyeler Basel
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2012 with funding from
Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO
http://archive.org/details/comettOOgiac
Acknowledgements
This comprehensive Alberto Giacometti retrospective organized by The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum owes its existence to the unexpected
availability of a large and important group of works from Swiss museums.
Through the courtesy of the Pro Helvetia Foundation and its Director, Luc
Boissonnas, the Guggenheim was apprised of a building program designed to
enlarge the exhibition space of the famous Kunsthaus in Zurich— one of the
three beneficiaries of a permanent loan allocated by The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation. The other museums provided for are the Kunstmuseum in Basel
and the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur. The enforced temporary closing of the
Giacometti wing at the Kunsthaus in Zurich impelled the representatives of
the Giacometti Foundation, the Pro Helvetia Foundation and the directors
of the three museums named above, with the enthusiastic support of His
Excellency the Ambassador of Switzerland, Felix Schnyder, to initiate a tour
of Japan, the United States and Canada of all travel-worthy items in
their custody. The Guggenheim Museum offered to receive the Swiss Gia-
cometti treasure from Japan with the understanding that it would arrange
for its subsequent presentation on the North American continent. The
Guggenheim also obtained permission from the Swiss sponsors to add to the
works from the Giacometti Foundation loans from worldwide sources and
in this manner transform a strong nucleus into a full retrospective for the
initial New York showing.
The difficult task of such a transformation was carried out by Dr. Louise
Averill Svendsen, this museum's Curator. She was aided by Dr. Reinhold
Hohl, author of the monograph Alberto Giacometti, published in 1971 by
Harry N. Abrams, whose familiarity with Giacometti's work greatly facil-
itated our search. Dr. Hohl has also contributed the introduction to this
catalogue. We also acknowledge the assistance of Eva Wyler, who qualified
for collaboration with us through previous experience gained in the prep-
aration of other Swiss art exhibitions.
The organization of major exhibitions now transcends the financial
capacities of most American art museums and the Guggenheim Museum,
alas, is not exempt in this regard. It is, therefore, all the more gratifying to
report increasing willingness of American corporations to provide financial
sponsorship without which massive and sustained cultural programs by art
museums are no longer possible. It is thus through the farsighted generosity
of Alcoa Foundation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that the New York showing
of the Alberto Giacometti retrospective, as well as that of the accompany-
ing exhibition of Three Swiss Painters, could be realized. The Guggenheim
Museum, as well as the public, has reason to acknowledge Alcoa's decisive
contribution with much gratitude. The circulation of the Giacometti Foun-
dation loan has added to the financial burden of organizer and participants
alike and a grant from the Pro Helvetia Foundation, which also supported the
Three Swiss Painters exhibition is, therefore, gratefully acknowledged. In this
context, we also salute our sister institutions and their directors to whom we
are indebted for many helpful acts in the course of a necessarily lengthy and
complex synchronization of effort. They are Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Martin Friedman, Director; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Sherman E. Lee,
Director; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Jean Sutherland Boggs,
Director; The Des Moines Art Center, James T. Demetrion, Director. Valu-
able help and important scholarly contributions have also come to us from
Miss M. Lourie of Pro Helvetia, from Dr. Rene Wehrli, Director, and his staff
at the Kunsthaus Zurich, and Pierre Matisse, Sidney Janis and Alicia Legg,
all of New York City.
The Guggenheim Museum's most grateful acknowledgement, as always,
is directed toward the lenders, most notably the Giacometti Foundation,
under the presidency of Mr. H. C. Bechtler, and also to the artist's widow,
Mrs. Annette Giacometti, in Paris, as well as institutions and individuals in
Europe and the United States. Names of lenders are listed separately.
The retrospective devoted to Alberto Giacometti is preceded by a selection
of works by three Swiss artists— Alberto's father Giovanni, his cousin
Augusto and his godfather Cuno Amiet. While there is no intention to over-
state stylistic connections between this older generation of Swiss artists and
Alberto Giacometti, the biographical and critical texts as presented in the
Three Siviss Painters catalogue will, we believe, add to our comprehension of
Alberto Giacometti's position in twentieth-century art. Credit for this feature
goes to the Museum of Art of The Pennsylvania State University, its Director
William Hull and to Dr. George Mauner as curator of the exhibition and
author of the accompanying catalogue.
Lastly, it should be emphasized that a project as far ranging and complex
as the Alberto Giacometti retrospective can be undertaken only with a highly
trained and dedicated museum staff. Virtually every department of the
Guggenheim participated in the exhibition and should receive full credit. In
lieu of expressions of thanks addressed to so many, however, I must refer to
the separately printed staff list for individual names and mention here only
Linda Konheim's and Cheryl McClenney's administrative assistance; Carol
Fuerstein's extensive editorial work; and the contributions of Orrin Riley's
technical expertise without which I could not have installed the show.
Thomas M. Messer, Director
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Alcoa Foundation has for many years worked to advance the support and
understanding of the fine arts by sponsoring significant exhibitions for the
public to see and enjoy. The exhibition Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective
and Three Swiss Painters gives us an outstanding and highly appropriate op-
portunity to help present to public view the works of a major creative per-
sonality of the twentieth century and three of his precursors. The directors of
Alcoa Foundation are pleased and honored to be associated with The Sol-
omon R. Guggenheim Museum in making this presentation possible.
Arthur M. Doty, President
Alcoa Foundation
Preface
Among the great sculptors of our age Alberto Giacometti has the most
distinct style. His gray, attenuated men and women come upon us from
the distance like apparitions that seem in constant danger of dissolution in
light and space despite their sudden, miraculous proximity. Fragile and in-
substantial, often no more than a streak in space, the standing or walking
personages suggest a merely conditional existence. Giacometti's art, there-
fore, is often related to a twentieth-century pessimism that has also been
evoked in word and image by other artists, philosophers and poets. Gia-
cometti's symbolic content, however, must be seen as inevitable consequence
and not as creative intention. His exclusive concern was to find a form-lan-
guage that would lend a convincing reality-dimension to the visions that
fulfilled and oppressed him and nothing was further from his conscious striv-
ing than the illustration of a philosophy.
Very early, it became clear to the young Alberto that things and beings—
the natural world from which he drew his subjects— could not simply be
reproduced. Like Cezanne before him, Giacometti knew about the mutual
exclusiveness of art and nature. He created early masterpieces by compre-
hending autonomous abstract form, but eventually rejected a formal perfec-
tion attained at the expense of verisimilitude— that aspect of reality that may
be confirmed by common vision. In his famous letter to his dealer friend
Pierre Matisse, Giacometti summarized the issue with utmost conciseness by
stating: "I saw afresh the bodies that attracted me in life, and the abstract
forms which I felt were true in sculpture. But I wanted the one without losing
the other
In Giacometti's youthful creation, roughly from the mid-twenties to the
mid-thirties, his efforts were bent toward accommodation between form and
expression. Working first with the inherited language of Cubism and subse-
quently sharing with his contemporaries the premises of Surrealism, Gia-
cometti's sculptures and drawings symbolized and illuminated universal
human states in conceptual formulations of high perfection. The subsequent
decade, from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties, was given to relentless and
painstaking experimentation that produced few works but prepared the
ground for an existential, subjective approach which, paradoxically, yielded
results of greater objectivity and universal validity. All the sculptor's means
and his total visual environment— materials, surfaces, scale, distances and
proximities, space and light— were related to the viewer's vision and mobi-
lized to transform concepts into matter capable of projecting the reality of
true being. Only in the last two decades of his life, from the mid-forties to
his death in 1966, was Giacometti's art capable of relating the three reality-
10
levels described by Carlo Huber as: reality as it is; reality as it is perceived;
and reality as it can be represented.
In this late phase of characteristically elongated shapes, Giacometti's
framework remains constant, whether in sculpture, in drawing, or in paint-
ing that now assumes a position of renewed importance. The wide conceptual
span observable in his early sculptures has narrowed while the quest for the
rendition of the real continues unabated. Through the related components
of radical formal innovation, great expressive strength and regard for a true-
to-life plausibility, Alberto Giacometti's oeuvre imposes upon us a compelling
world view.
T.M.M.
II
Form and Vision:
The Work of
Alberto Giacometti
Giacometti was an artist of many talents. One of the most significant of these
was the lucid intelligence with which he raised the fundamental questions of
art and linked his own life and work to the adventures, ambiguities and
contradictions of the artistic process. The effect of his writings and conver-
sations on the appreciation and interpretation of his work was great. So per-
vasive was this influence, that the present exhibition, eight years after his
death, is a welcome and necessary occasion to reconsider from new angles
the importance of Giacometti's oeuvre, and to discuss anew the possible
meaning of his works. We begin to see a grand design linking many of his
sculptures— an aspect that we would like to call the mythic dimension of his
work, notwithstanding the fact that Giacometti himself disguised this aspect
by presenting his works as mere studies after nature, as tentative results, as
not yet (and, as he said,1 probably never to be) successful attempts.
This mythic dimension was to have been fully expressed in Giacometti's
project for a monumental group at Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York.
Late in 1958 he had been commissioned to submit a sculptural project for
this site.2 Giacometti had treated this commission as the long awaited oppor-
tunity to realize a compositional idea that had occupied him for nearly thirty
years.3 The bronze figure of a Standing Woman— tall, mysterious, inscruta-
ble, enduring as a tree; a life-size Walking Man— forever on his way to ful-
fillment—and a giant Monumental Head— at once an observing, creative head
and a sculpture of a sculptured head— were to make up the composition.
Small scale studies were done in 1959 (cat. no. 93), full-size figures were cast
in i960 (cat. nos. 94-99); a final state was never reached. Had the group been
realized, it would have presented the metaphorical or mythical image of the
greater Reality beyond daily preoccupations.
Reviewing Giacometti's oeuvre, one will find that it consists of a few
sculptural themes, and that a common thread is the exploration and use of
such a compositional idea as embodied in the Chase Manhattan group. We
understand many of his works to be small projects for such a monumental
group in a public place, and it is our assumption— which will be demon-
strated here— that the long series of Standing Women, Walking Men and
Heads are studies for a more complex compositional idea.
In the last five years of his life, Giacometti seems to have put aside the idea
of a group composition, and even of a monumental outdoor sculpture. He
concentrated on single works, and we have to envisage his final goals in
sculpture in each individual work, particularly in the Busts of Annette, Busts
of Diego and Busts of Elie Lotar of i960 to 1965.
But when Giacometti came to New York in 1965 to see his retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art, he visited several times the Chase Manhattan
13
Plaza site. James Lord has described how the artist placed some of his friends
on the Plaza and gauged the effect.4 When Giacometti left New York, he was
determined to continue the Chase Manhattan project and ask his brother and
life-long collaborator Diego to begin preparations for a single, very tall
Standing Woman.5 Once he had returned to Europe he expressed his confi-
dence that he could now realize a monument for the Plaza.6 Two months
later he died.
Life, Personality, Writings
In his own lifetime, Alberto Giacometti was already a legendary figure. His
friends— artists, photographers and a surprisingly great number of writers
—sensed his extraordinary personality and testified to it. But a younger gen-
eration, who saw him late at night sitting and talking at the Montparnasse
cafes, also worshipped him— not so much for his work, as for the originality,
intensity and integrity of his character.
His life was not rich in biographical incident, yet his life story is famous
as an exemplary spiritual adventure. Many documented conversations and
interviews as well as his own writings provided ample material to nourish
the legends. If they are not always true— we have reason to doubt the factual
accuracy of many of his own stories about particular sculptures and even of
some autobiographical accounts — , they have a ring of necessity and poetic
truth, which makes them all the more significant.
The facts of his life are quickly summarized. Born in 1901 into a family of
renowned Swiss artists, he benefited from an extensive humanistic and scien-
tific education until the age of eighteen. He had painted and sculpted as a
boy; he now concentrated on painting on an experimental basis in his father's
studio for several months, and subsequently more professionally at the Acad-
emy in Geneva. In the fall of 1920 he went to Italy to become a painter. He
used his four weeks in Florence and six months in Rome primarily to visit
museums and sketch in art collections and churches, instead of pursuing for-
mal studies. He returned to Switzerland with the firm intention of becoming
a sculptor, even though (or perhaps because) he had found it easier to paint
than sculpt. When he arrived in Paris in early 1922 he enrolled at the Aca-
demie de la Grande Chaumiere and studied irregularly with (it might be
more precise to say against) Antoine Bourdelle until 1926. In 1927 he rented
the small, now historic, studio at 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, where he
worked until the end of his life. What seems to have been the only incident
which upset the ordered pattern of his existence occurred in 1942, when he
visited Geneva and could not obtain a visa to re-enter France until after the
War. He never experienced financial hardship, even during the years he did
not produce saleable sculpture, thanks to the loyalty of his family, in par-
ticular his brother Diego. And, even when he had achieved fame and wealth,
he did not change his extremely modest and bohemian life-style.
The document most often cited as a source of biographical fact and insight
into his artistic development is the letter Giacometti wrote to Pierre Matisse
in late 1947 concerning an exhibition to be held at the latter's New York gal-
lery in January 1948. An epic account and a literary tour-de-force, it begins
simply, but goes on to present his artistic production as a coherent and nec-
14
essary development linked to his life: "Here is the list of sculptures that I
promised you, but I could not put it down without explaining a certain suc-
cession of facts, without which it would make no sense. I made my first bust
from nature in 1914 . . . and still look at [it] with a feeling of longing and
nostalgia." In 1914, of course, he was a boy of thirteen. Surprisingly, he felt
it was necessary to go this far back— indeed he reached even further back
into his childhood: "At the same time and even years before I was doing a
lot of drawings and paintings . . . [andjoften copied paintings and sculptures
from reproductions." He mentioned this because he had "continued to do
the same thing ... up to the present." It is this awareness of the coherence of
his life story that gave it the character of a saga in which the artistic search
and stylistic crises are the adventures and turning points. This gave rise to
some curious embellishments in his own account of his life. "In 1919 I went
to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva for not even a year," Giacometti went
on, "I had an aversion to it . . ." But then, in his handwriting, he changed
the manuscript in a significant way: "In 1919 I went to the Ecole des Beaux
Arts in Geneva for three days, and after, to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers to
study sculpture."7 The facts are, that Giacometti attended David Estoppey's
afternoon painting class at the Academy in Geneva from the fall of 1919 to
early March 1920, and Maurice Sarkissoff's drawing class at the Arts and
Crafts School there mornings, and studied sculpture privately with the lat-
ter.8 Yet this is not the point we want to make. We quote the text-revision
as an example of Giacometti's habit of returning to and revising previous
formulations in order to arrive at a more powerful expression; this is seen
most significantly in his sculpture and paintings, which is an endless process
of revision. "Three days" is certainly the better poetic formulation. And it
also reflected a mythical family pattern; for his father Giovanni and his
father's second cousin Augusto changed from a painting academy to a school
of applied arts after, respectively, one day and one week.9
Giacometti's style gives this letter extraordinary immediacy. Although
carefully edited and thoroughly structured, it seems to be the product of an
hour's impulsive writing. The last paragraph (another significant revision,
followed by a genial literary finale) brings the account of thirty years of
artistic life to an effective conclusion in the present: "And this is almost where
I am today, no, where I still was yesterday . . . but I am not sure about all
this. And now I stop, besides they are closing, I must pay."
There is almost no decisive change in his artistic evolution that Giacometti
did not present in this or other writings and interviews as stemming from
often quite miraculous incidents. Personal experiences and philosophical
insights certainly were elements at the origin of his art, making it unique. His
eminently literary mind and talent gave them significance and cannot be ex-
cluded when examining the meaning of his works. His intellectual lucidity,
his poetic or even visionary character combined with his extremely original
approach to reality confers upon his artistic realizations a mythical dimension.
Giacometti's texts about his work abound in mystifying stories— for in-
stance the letter he contributed to the catalogue of the second New York
exhibition after the War, held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1950. Again,
there is a first text and a revision of it the following day. This process of
revision is alluded to in the very first sentence: "The titles I gave you yester-
15
fig. I
Model for a Square. 1932. Plaster,
Private collection, Paris
day do not go." Giacometti corrects "yesterday's facts" with "today's truths."
There is no more interesting introduction to Giacometti's personality and
art than to study some of his remarks and their variations of the following
day.10 Seemingly autobiographical anecdotes accompany yesterday's titles
of such complex works as Three Figures and One Head, Seven Figures and
One Head and Nine Figures. These compositions are described as fortuitous
results of clearing his work table, and also as the rendering of impressions
received in the preceding year and in his youth, when the trees and scattered
blocks of gneiss in the Engadine forest appeared to him like whispering
figures and heads— giving rise to their apocryphal titles The Sand, The Forest
and The Glade, respectively. The origin of Chariot is linked to a pharmacy
wagon he had seen in a hospital in 1938. The revised commentaries repeat
with much less insistence these anecdotal explanations, repudiate the "Sand,"
"Forest" and "Glade" as titles and call all three compositions "Place," which
may be translated "Square" or even "City Square" in reference to one of
Giacometti's most persistent compositional projects. In "today's" text Gia-
cometti linked the heads not only to the memory of blocks of gneiss, but to
"heads I dreamt of doing almost twenty years ago" — that is around 1932,
thus providing a key to the understanding of works like Model for a Square,
1932, (fig. 1) Table, 1933, and Cube, 1934, and evidence of the general
coherence of his sculptural compositions. As for Chariot, references are now
made to more formal problems, such as situating the figure in "empty space"
and at a precise distance from the floor; it would have been more accurate to
refer to the Egyptian two-wheel Battle Chariot of 1500 B.C., with wheel-
blocks as bases identical to his own, that Giacometti had seen at the Arche-
ological Museum in Florence. This letter concludes with the same uncer-
tainty as the 1947 letter did: "I will have to find a solution for the titles, but
as of now I am not sure. For now put the titles that you find the best after
16
what I have written before, yesterday and today." The real substance of this
letter was obviously not the problem of titles, but the allusion to, and con-
cealment of the more serious intentions behind the works.
These mystifications are very much in the Surrealist tradition. Moreover,
the writing of an elaborate text by the artist for an exhibition of his works is
in the spirit of the Surrealist exhibitions and manifestations of the thirties,
which were dominated by the eminently literary personality of Andre Breton.
When Giacometti began to write in 193 1, it was for Breton's Surrealist
periodical Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. A seemingly autobio-
graphical text like his 1933 commentary on Palace at 4 a.m.11 is no more than
a piece of typical Surrealist prose, a combination of sexually tinted child-
hood memories, miraculous or very banal incidents experienced as fate,
memorable crises and pseudo-psychoanalytical investigations. In his writ-
ings, Giacometti continued to conform to Surrealist attitudes even after the
War, rather than reveal his true preoccupations, which we see as mythical
expression. Yet he expressly repudiated Surrealist doctrine when he con-
cluded his essay on Callot, written in 1945, with the remark that in every
work of art the subject matter is of primordial importance and its origin "is
not necessarily Freudian."12
Giacometti's writings reflect the literary atmosphere of the periods in
which they were written. During the War and early post- War years, he was
close to Sartre, and probably even contributed to his theories about being
and nothingness;13 he read, and may have met, Camus. Existentialism is dis-
cernible in his texts Le Reve, le sphinx et la mort de T. of 1946 and Mai 1920,
published in 1953, but probably written some years earlier. The first of'
these two essays is again an outstanding literary accomplishment; it is pre-
sented as a combination of at least three consecutive attempts to tell a story
and embraces techniques of Surrealism, Existentialism and— before the term
was even coined— nouveau roman. The rhythmically phrased texts of 1953
to 1965 reveal the influence of Samuel Beckett, with whom Giacometti had
many, unfortunately unrecorded, conversations. Ma Realite, 1957, Notes
sur les copies, 1965 and Tout cela nest pas grand chose, 1965, are Giaco-
metti's most serious and powerful writings. Yet when he concluded the text
about his copies of October 18, 1965 with the sentences, "I don't know am I
a comedian, a bum, an idiot or a scrupulous fellow. I only know that I've got
to keep trying to draw a nose from nature."14 he did not only echo Beckett's
final sentence of The Unnamable: ". . . where I am, I don't know, I'll never
know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go
on." but also one of Cezanne's last letters to his son Paul, dated October 13,
1906: "I must carry on. I simply must produce after nature."
To draw or sculpt or paint a nose from nature was what Giacometti did
in his last years. But his late works would not have their compelling impact,
if they did not also express the accumulated experiences of Giacometti's life
and thoughts, as poetically embodied in his writings. We will demonstrate
this relationship when discussing Giacometti's album of lithographs Paris
sans fin, 1958-65, for which he wrote some revealing pages.
Here, it is more relevant, however, to return to the previous period of
1946 to 1950, to the texts which are still somewhat Surrealist although essen-
tially Existentialist. This is the period of what is considered Giacometti's
17
characteristic style of elongated, thin figures, of compositions like City
Square, Three Figures and a Head, Three Men Walking, the series of Standing
Women, and ideas incorporated in the later Chase Manhattan project. In he
Reve, le sphinx et la mort de T. and Mai 1920, there seems to be much of bio-
graphical and philosophical relevance beyond the usual literary attitudes. As
a young man in Italy in 1920, Alberto Giacometti was captivated by the
emotional truth in Tintoretto's paintings, in which he found a reflection of
his own excitement about Venice; he could not interest himself as deeply in
anything else for a whole month. But one afternoon among Giotto's frescoes
in Padua made him regretfully change his mind, for Giotto's style showed
him another, more powerful truth in art. The very same evening, according
to his account, he found yet another truth: the living reality of two or three
girls in the street— some nocturnal ladies perhaps, parading in front of the
young lad from the Bregaglia valley— who seemed to him powerful and dis-
proportionately tall. He did not approach them; he was struck by the discov-
ery, that Art, even Tintoretto's and Giotto's, could never match Reality. The
image of the girls remained with him ever after, like the memory of an appa-
rition. He rediscovered this characteristic of extreme tallness in the summer of
192.1, when a man suddenly appeared between the columns of a temple in
Paestum. And he rediscovered what had attracted him to Tintoretto in an
Egyptian bust in Florence, the first head that seemed to him to truly resemble
reality; he found it also in the strongly stylized, elongated, hieratic figures in
the mosaics of the church of Sts. Cosma and Damian in Rome, which seemed
to him like recreated doubles of the Paduan girls. Only Cezanne among more
recent artists seemed to Giacometti to achieve this same quality.
Around his twentieth birthday, in a hotel room in Tirol, he witnessed the
painful death of a companion, whose agonized head he could never forget.
He suddenly understood that the essence of the dead man was his absence,
and that life is presence.15 Many years later, Giacometti observed another
dead man's head and saw "a fly crawl into the black hole of the mouth and
there disappear."16
It is easy to find examples among Giacometti's sculpture of the period in
which these texts were written, which more or less relate to these experiences
(Head of a Man on a Rod, 1947, for instance, or the tall Standing Women
of 1947-49), but such literal parallels obscure the broader meanings of
Giacometti's art. Yet these texts allow us to form some conclusions about
Giacometti's esthetics and the mythic content of his work: Art is opposed to
Reality; the perception of reality is experienced as a sudden apparition; to see
a person suddenly as a whole reveals, above all, his verticality; style in art can
produce an equivalent to the power of life; an art work may become a double
of reality if the artist can confer upon it the credibility of a living presence.
Formal Developments in the Sculpture
In one of the annual letters Giacometti wrote from Stampa to his godfather
Cuno Amiet, he mentioned his first successful sculptures, portrait heads of
his brothers Diego and Bruno, modelled during the winter of 1914-15.17 Half
a century later, in the summer of 1964, while modelling a head— perhaps in
the same room— Giacometti said in an interview filmed for Swiss television:
18
"If I ever succeed in realizing a single head, I'll probably give up sculpture
for good. But the funniest thing is, that if I were to do a head as I want to,
then probably nobody would be interested in it anymore .... What if it were
just a banal little head? In fact, since 1935, this is what I've always wanted
to do. I've always failed."18
As a boy, inspired by reproductions of sculptures by Rodin, Giacometti
had experienced no difficulties in making busts of his brothers. He applied
the conventions which were valid from Roman sculptors through contempo-
raries like Maillol — representations not of what one sees, but of what one
knows about the reality of a head: its tangible volume and substance, its
measurable size. But at a certain moment in his career— Giacometti men-
tioned the year 1935, which should not be taken too literally— he attempted
to pierce through these conventions and model a head as he actually per-
ceived it: a purely visual entity situated in front of him at a distance and seen
immediately as a unity. He had to create unprecedented sculptural means for
such a representation — even Medardo Rosso's impressionistically modelled
figures do not embody this radical new concept. To have found this new
sculptural dimension as well as a variety of means to realize it is the basis of
Giacometti's position in the history of sculpture. This new effect is easily
understood: whereas a figure by Rosso, Rodin or the Etruscans (the latter
so often erroneously compared to Giacometti's works because of their ex-
treme elongation) seen close-up and from all sides does not cease to be the
image of a figure, Giacometti's sculptures are images only when seen at a dis-
tance and, as a rule, frontally; seen too near or from the back they are but
crusty material.
These remarks, of course, apply to his mature style. But Giacometti was
an extraordinarily original sculptor even in his earlier years. In the evolution
of his work we can observe a continuing vacillation between two poles—
these poles are the natural forms of reality and the conceptual forms of
abstraction, the truth of external life and the truth of art. Within this polarity
the forms of his work changed from relatively naturalistic (until 1925) to
stylized (1925-1927) to near abstract elements (1928-1931); then human
forms were opposed to abstract within a single compositional project (1932-
1934). In 1935 the great adventure of seeing reality anew began. His works of
the following ten years were, with a few exceptions, studies of heads and
figures from nature (1935-1941), memory (1942-1945) and nature again
(1946). In 1947 Giacometti finally reached a stage in which he could realize
in his personal sculptural style, a representation of his perception as well as
of compositional ideas that he had abandoned in 1934. 1947-1950 and 1956
were the years of major realizations, usually made for exhibitions which were
particularly important to him. Between 195 1 and 1956 he most often pur-
sued studies from nature. The years 1957 to 1961 marked the period of tran-
sition to his late style; it was at this moment that he was asked to submit a
project for a monument for the Chase Manhattan Plaza, a project which was
left unfinished. His late sculpture differs noticeably from his post-War style
and culminated in the busts of 1964-65.
This stylistic evolution is demonstrable through a discussion of specific
sculptural problems. During his first three years in Paris, Giacometti made
realistic portrait studies. As these heads became more stylized they grew in
19
sculptural quality but lost their descriptive sensibility. Subsequently he whole-
heartedly embraced the Cubist and post-Cubist vocabulary of Duchamp-
Villon, Laurens and Lipchitz (Torso, 1925 (cat. no. 1); Personages, 1926-27
(cat. no. 6); Cubist Composition (Man), 1926 (cat. no. 5); Construction:
Woman, 1927). In these works references to natural shapes are replaced by
the formal balance of volumes and voids. Giacometti was saved from eclec-
ticism because of his superior sense of delicate proportions and extraordinary
gift for reducing his forms to a most powerful simplicity. He also invested his
sculptures— most notably Man and Woman, 1926, Little Crouching Man,
1926, Spoon Woman, 1926 and Sculpture, 1927 (cat. nos. 4, 2, 3, 10)— with
the emotional intensity of primitive art. He was, of course, not the first artist
to use primitive art forms — Brancusi, Picasso, Laurens and Lipchitz did so
before him. But Giacometti recreated the vital forces inherent in primitive
carvings rather than merely borrowing their formal elements.19 His sculp-
tural signs for genitals and copulation express a mythical content which is
— as in primitive art— a formulation of a universal and always active reality.
This search for an intense expression of basic compositional forms made it
difficult for Giacometti in this period to sculpt portrait heads (for instance
Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1927, (cat. no. 7); Portrait of the Artisfs
Father, 1917, (cat. nos. 8, 9) until he had found in Cycladic sculpture ex-
amples of utmost sculptural purity and almost dematerialized expressiveness.
Giacometti arrived at a style of sculptural maturity in 1928 with a series of
slab-like works of which the most important are Observing Heads (cat. nos.
12, 13). The title itself reveals his intention of rendering a head, not as an
object, but as a living force— a preoccupation that lasted until his death. The
figures, on the other hand, were now reduced to sculptural signs {Reclining
Woman, 1929, (cat. no. 17), Man, 1929, (cat. no. 19)), which could be com-
bined, like hieroglyphs, to become expressive compositions (Man and
Woman, 1928-29, (cat. no. 16)).
The Reclining Woman who Dreams, 1929, (cat. no. 18) marks the transition
to Surrealism. Giacometti was not merely influenced by the Surrealist move-
ment, but he was, together with Arp and Picasso, one of Surrealism's most
authentic sculptors. With the vocabulary he had developed at his disposal —
half-sphere, crescent, spike, pole and cone—, Giacometti's principal concern
was now to animate and to arrange these forms into scenes suggestive of sex-
ual encounters and cruel confrontations. The problem was that of fixing or
even staging the "characters" of his plots— a problem easy to resolve in paint-
ing,20 where the canvas serves as the stage. In sculpture the problem ulti-
mately becomes essentially that of the relationship between sculpture and
base.21 Giacometti invented some extremely effective solutions. The Three
Figures Outdoors, 1929, (cat. no. 21) are presented as an upright grill.22 For
Suspended Ball, 1930, (cat. no. 22) he constructed a cage from the top of
which hangs a ball on a string. The ball swings freely over but never touches
a crescent, which rests on a platform, inside the cage. The field of action of
Circuit, 193 1 (cat. no. 26) is a flat wooden board. Palace at 4 a.m., 1932 (fig.
2) is a veritable model for a stage; in fact, all the works of the early thirties are
like visual models used to express psychological dramas, dramas which in-
tensely effect the viewer.
20
fig. 2
Palace at 4 a.m. 1932.-33. Wood, glass,
wire, string. Collection The Museum of
Modern Art, New York
To enhance their effectiveness, Giacometti considered making at least one
of these pieces, Model for a Square, 1932 (fig. 1), life-size, so that the spectator
might enter the composition to assist in the "plot." If real people were to
move among the sculptural forms and become part of the composition, the
antagonism between reality and art would at once be exposed and resolved.
Giacometti found other ways to constitute links between his sculpture and
the real world. He made the work of art become a part of the existing envi-
ronment by eliminating the base so that the sculpture would lie on a table
like any other object, as in Disagreeable Object (cat. no. 24) and Disagree-
able Object to be Disposed of, both of 193 1, (cat. no. 25) or on the floor
at the mercy of the spectator, as in Woman with her Throat Cut, 1932, (cat.
no. 28) or by making the base belong at once to the imaginary world of art
and the real world of a furnished room, as in Table, 1933 (cat. no. 31).
Giacometti's art was never more Surrealistic than in these ambiguous pieces,
since they do not merely exist as objects to be perceived esthetically, but pro-
voke the viewer's active confrontation and participation. The next step was
to control the viewer's participation by indicating where he should stand in
relation to the sculpture. The most basic relationship is a frontal encounter.
This frontal relationship is implied in Caress, 1932 (cat. no. 27) by means of
engraved outlines of a right and a left hand on the left and right sides of the
marble sculpture, whose shape suggests a pregnant woman. These hands—
they are actually the artist's own hands— are immediately understood as the
hands of someone who stands directly in front of the work, thus prefiguring
Giacometti's intentions in his post-War Standing Women.25
Although the concept of abolishing the strict distinction between the world
of art and the world of reality by incorporating the art work into the real
environment of the viewer is eminently Surrealist, Giacometti could not
comply very long with Surrealist doctrines. Whereas Surrealist activities—
especially the exhibitions after 1935— were ephemeral displays of assorted
objects, assembled to create fantastic situations, Giacometti wanted to make
permanent and even monumental compositions. Had the Model for a Square
been realized life-size, its sculptural elements would have had more in com-
mon with monuments like the prehistoric Stonehenge complex or the mon-
umental heads of Easter Island — with their expression of some universal or
mythical reality— than with a Surrealist manifestation.
This spiritual dimension necessarily escaped Andre Breton, when he com-
mented on the origin of Giacometti's The Invisible Object, 1934 (cat. no.
33).24 The title itself as well as the pun inherent in its alternate title, "Mains
tenant le vide" (Hands Holding the Void), which can be read as "Maintenant
le vide" (And now emptiness), is a rebuke to the Surrealist cult of the object.
Contrary to Breton's story that a mysterious object found at the flea-market
(it was, in fact, the prototype for an iron protection mask designed by the
French Medical Corps in the First World War)25 had helped the artist to find
his forms, Giacometti had borrowed the stylized human shapes from a
Solomon Islands Seated Statue of a Deceased Woman, which he had seen at
the Ethnological Museum in Basel, and had combined them with other ele-
ments of Oceanic art, such as the bird-like demon of death. These formal
origins, together with the impact of a hieratic frontality, should be considered
above all for their mythical content.
2Z
Some time before 1935, Giacometti began to feel that there was no real
difference between the almost abstract forms of his work and the vases and
lamps he was designing for an interior decorator. (One of his decorative
objects was, in fact, reproduced in an avant-garde publication of 1937 with
the caption Sculpture.26).
Giacometti described the dilemma he experienced in this period in his
1947 letter to Pierre Matisse: "I saw afresh the bodies that attracted me in
life and the abstract forms which I felt were true in sculpture. But I wanted
the one without losing the other . . . And then the desire to make composi-
tions with figures." Walking Woman, 1932 (cat. no. 29) and Cube, 1934 (cat.
no. 34) (a stereometric form already used in Table, 1933) exemplify these
preoccupations. Cube was to represent a head and was part of a monumental
project which will be discussed later; the elegantly and most sensitively styl-
ized Walking Woman relates to the stance and style of Archipenko's bronze
Flat Torso, 1914. In 1935, stylization— whether geometric or biomorphic —
was no longer Giacometti's aim. He wanted to go further and create figures
which would be perceived as reality is perceived, and which at once would
carry the imprint of the spectator's perceptive participation. He began to
make studies from nature for such a figure, but he soon limited his investiga-
tions to a head. He began to explore the phenomena of perception and
reached conclusions with profound esthetic, psychological and philosophical
repercussions.
A head or a figure is perceived at a single stroke and is experienced as an
indivisible unity. If this were not so, it would be seen merely as an accumula-
tion of disorganized elements of skin, eyelashes and so on. Since the object
must always be seen at a distance, there is always space between it and the
viewer's eye. Perception, as Giacometti thought of it, is an exclusively visual
experience which reveals no sense of weight, and only by mental correction
the actual size of the object. He also found that real visual contact was estab-
lished only by looking full-face at a person, usually directly into his eyes.
Giacometti concluded that the imprint of the viewer's perception on a work
of art could be expressed by rendering the effect that the art work was seen
at an unbridgeable distance as an immediately understood unity which is
seen frontally and owes its existence as an image to the viewer. The sculpture
is transformed from mere clay or bronze into a figure by the active participa-
tion of the viewer.
All Giacometti's sculptures between 1936 and 1941 were studies related to
these researches. Their style may appropriately be called phenomenological
realism, in contrast to the conceptual realism of traditional sculpture. Woman
with Chariot, 1942, (cat. no. 39) is the only large-scale piece from this
period; the figure stands on a cube to which wheels are attached, so that the
sculpture might be moved back and forth and thus demonstrate changes in
its phenomenological size.
Between 1942 and 1946 Giacometti made extremely small sculptures and
placed them on relatively large bases, to create the effect that the figures were
far away from the viewer. Moreover, the figures do not have detailed fea-
tures, which reinforces the sense of distance. Their miniscule size renders not
so much actual perception as the remembered image of a figure seen far away
13
on the street, which has lost all recognizable details without losing its
identity.
His phenomenological investigations led Giacometti to further conclusions
in 1946. He realized that space does not exist merely in front of a figure, but
surrounds and separates it from other objects. When we look at something,
we see as much of this space (particularly at the sides of the object) as our
field of vision permits.27 The figure seen at a distance appears pronouncedly
thin in relation to the absolute standard of our field of vision. As a conse-
quence of its thinness, the figure also appears relatively tall. The change from
the tiny representations of the preceding years to the elongated figures of
1946 resulted from new studies— mostly drawings— from nature.
In 1947 Giacometti gave permanent form to his visual experiences and
adopted them as his new sculptural style of elongated, thin, seemingly weight-
less and massless figures. This style is as expressive and effective for complex
monumental compositions as it is for single heads and figures seen frontally.
He had broken through the traditional sculptural conventions and found a
truly personal way to express his vision of reality.
He overtly challenged these conventions by referring to traditional sculp-
tural themes in his own sculpture: in Man Pointing, 1947 (cat. no. 50) (part of
a now lost two-figure composition28) he presented his own version of the pose
of the classical Greek Poseidon of Cap Artemision, or of Rodin's St. John the
Baptist Preaching; Walking Man, 1947, (cat. no. 47) is his version of Rodin's
Walking Man; every motionless Standing Woman from 1947 to 1949 is an
allusion to Egyptian burial figures or early Greek Korai, whose hair style they
even occasionally borrow. The base of a Statiding Woman is often not only
the traditional device to make the sculpture stand, but an abbreviated per-
spectival rendering of the floor on which the model was standing, and which
thus becomes an integral part of the sculptural image. In the expressive Head
of a Man on a Rod (cat. no. 48) the problem of the base is eliminated by plac-
ing the head atop a rod.29
Giacometti was now ready to execute complex compositions of his own
— the "compositions with figures" he had desired to make before working
from nature in 1935. Three Men Walking and City Square, 1948, (cat. nos.
55, 56) may be considered as models for such works, for which he also
made large studies. These works cannot adequately be discussed in purely
formal terms; their themes will be analyzed in their iconographical context.
Based on the concept of the Woman with Chariot, 1942, Giacometti executed
the monumental bronze Chariot, 1950, for a public plaza, a commission that
was ultimately rejected by the Municipality of the City of Paris.30 The espe-
cially numerous realizations of the fifties include Four Figurines on a Base
(cat. no. 62) of which the base is, like that of Table, 1933, both a part of our
real environment and an element of the imaginary world of the work of art;
the pedestal supporting the figures is triangular, rendering a foreshortened
representation of the shining floor on which Giacometti — according to his
1950 letter to Pierre Matisse— had seen some seemingly unapproachable
women in a cabaret. In Four Women on a Base, 1950, (cat. no. 61) the women
are represented as isolated individuals, united only by the base and the space
they share. This idea perhaps provides a key to the understanding of the
Standing Woman series of 1956, known as Women of Venice I to IX, for
M
example cat. nos. 76-81, which were made for the Venice Biennale of that
year. These were executed as individual figures— some are in fact casts of dif-
ferent states of execution of the same sculpture,31 however, they achieve their
full meaning, which is an expression of solidarity, when shown as a group, as
they were when arranged by Giacometti at his exhibitions in Venice and Bern
in 1956. One of the projects that did not progress beyond the model stage is
the Project for a Monument to a Famous Man (cat. no. 82) of 1956. The
sculptures of the fifties, mostly figures of Standing Women and busts called
Head of a Man— generally done after nature, with Giacometti's wife Annette
and his brother Diego as models— reflect a slow but constant development to-
wards a new sculptural concept and a new style. Giacometti abandoned the
extreme dematerialization of the figures, and after 1955, also the blade-like
thinness of the heads, and replaced these stylistic exaggerations of his vision
with several other effects such as fragmentation or treatment of the now more
massive busts as sculptural repoussoirs, that is, as contrasts to increase the
illusionary distance of the heads.
Giacometti began to see that a sculpture, which was to become a "double
of reality,"32 could no longer be represented merely as a function of the
viewer's perception; it must rather be a creation existing independently of
the spectator's eye. The confrontation should be a mutual one. From the late
1950's on, Giacometti therefore concentrated almost exclusively on the prob-
lem of conferring a life-like gaze upon his sculptures, for the faculty of see-
ing, the spark of life in the eyes is the proof of the real existence of these
heads. Seated Woman, 1956, (cat. no. 86) is a work which expresses these
new concepts — she possesses a new sculptural solidity and, most important,
her own gaze. The busts of Diego on a Stele, 1957 (cat. nos. 88, 89) even re-
employ the Roman and Baroque formulation of the base as a stele, but
Giacometti integrated the base with the sculpture. This quotation of a tradi-
tional format enhances the novelty and power of the head's presence, in par-
ticular its gaze. The Monumental Head of i960 refers in its sheer size, volume
and gazing eyes to the Roman Colossal Head of Constantine, which Gia-
cometti had sketched at this time.34
Giacometti achieved his last style around 1962. The Busts of Annette, 1960-
1964, (cat. nos. 103-108) may seem, upon superficial inspection, to be rather
traditionally modelled busts— like the "banal little head" Giacometti spoke of
in the interview of 1964— were it not for the inescapable power of the gaze.
This is even more true of the Busts of Diego and Busts of Elie Lotar of 1965,
for example (cat. no. in). The most rudimentary representation of cor-
poreality imaginable, they are almost a negation of the organic existence of
their subjects. These busts bear almost no resemblance to their subjects; they
seem to be self portraits rather than portraits of the sitters. Though their
gaze is piercing, they do not look directly at the observer or acknowledge
his presence. Rather, they look through him, the vector of their gazes con-
necting the interior of their heads with another reality. They dominate their
surroundings by their very existence. They no longer exist in imaginary
space, but in our own space. They not only fill space, they actually create
the surrounding spatial relationships. Like the greatest religious sculptures
of the past— Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta, for example—, they impose
upon their surroundings the aura of a privileged, one may perhaps even say,
a sacred space.
*5
Some Continuing Compositional Ideas in the Sculpture
Modern interpreters are reluctant to go beyond the historical and formal
analysis of a work of art, since so many verbal fantasies have discredited the
legitimate search for meaning in art. The preliminaries for such a search for
meaning, which are the study of formal solutions, often become the not very
relevant end of art criticism.
Thus Giacometti's oeuvre cannot only be examined from the formal point
of view. We have already seen, for example, that the extreme slenderness and
elongation of his figures are significant for the ideas about perception that
they represent. But this can hardly be all that there is to be said. In this con-
text it is important to point out that these formal characeristics are not at all
related, as has often been proposed, to ideas of famine and the miseries of
war or concentration camps. Nor do the figures, isolated on their bases or
confined to a cage, express fashionable concepts of "existential solitude" or
"the anxiety of modern man."35 Giacometti made it clear, in interviews in
1962, that solitude was the very opposite of what he intended,36 and that
anxiety is the constant state of man.37
It would not be difficult to give an allegorical reading of certain pieces
whose titles invite philosophical speculation, or whose sculptural forms lend
themselves to metaphorical interpretations. The Figure between Two Houses,
1950, (cat. no. 58) for instance, is a woman visible in the center glass box
walking from a bronze box at left, into which we cannot see, to another
bronze box, into which we cannot see, at right. This figure could be described
as a metaphor for life originating in the unknown and proceeding towards
the other unknown which involves the certainty of death. In the 1950 Pierre
Matisse Gallery catalogue, Giacometti called the sculpture a "figure in a box
between two boxes which are houses." An unverified rumor even specifies
the "houses" Giacometti was referring to and implies that a 1945 newspaper
photograph of a nude woman chased from a cell block to the block of the
gas chamber actually inspired the artist to do this work. Even if this were true,
the sculpture would not be a mere representation of the ordeals of the con-
centration camps, but a glorification of Life as embodied in this woman. The
figure in some casts is painted in flesh tones to express her vulnerability, and
in at least one cast is gilded to represent her precious essence, like a golden
Egyptian burial figure.
This is not the place to analyze the metaphorical meaning of each of Gia-
cometti's compositions. Struck by the fact that a few sculptural themes—
among which are representations of walking women — recur at different
periods in Giacometti's sculpture, we rather ask what their unifying idea is.
We try to analyze the metaphorical imagery in order to formulate the
fundamental myths which they embody.
The walking woman between the two houses seems to have something in
common with the Walking Woman of 1932— but what does the triangular
cavity under the bust of this figure signify? Both seem related to the seated
figure "holding the void" of The Invisible Object, 1934, (cat. no. 33) Mother
and [Walking] Daughter, 1932, Tightrope Walker, 1943 and The Night,
1947, 38 a sculpture of a woman walking on a sarcophagus-like pedestal and
conceived as a project for a monument for the French Resistance. The com-
mon theme is continued in Woman on a Boat, 1950,39 a composition again
26
fig- 3
The Cage, detail, 1950. Bronze
reminiscent of Egyptian burial figures on boats, and finds its last realization
in Chariot, 1950, about which Giacometti wrote: "In 1947 I saw the sculp-
ture as if it had been made in front of me, and in 1950 it was impossible
for me not to execute it, although it was then for me already situated in the
past." Giacometti proposed the Chariot for a war memorial commission in
Paris at the moment he had developed new formulations for the expression
of his ideas in the figures of women. What these works have in common is
a vision of on-going life. This was, in fact, the formula inscribed in French
"La vie continue" on a now lost plaster composition, which is recognizable
in the left foreground of the drawing My Studio, 1932 (cat. no. 164): it
shows a pregnant body, similar to Caress, 1932, its back turned to an open
grave.40
From 1950 on, Giacometti's female figures were no longer represented as
walking or moving. The artist compared them to tall trees, as in Three Figures
and One Head (The Sand), Seven Figures and One Head (The Forest) and
Nine Figures (The Glade), all of 1950 (cat. nos. 63, 59, 64). In some of Gia-
cometti's rare color crayon drawings the theme of a man staring up into a tree
several times his size recurs, for instance Little Figure, Large Tree, 1962 (cat.
no. 187). Giacometti also used this same motif for the gate-grill of the E. J.
Kaufmann mausoleum at Bear Run, in the park of Frank Lloyd Wright's
house built over a waterfall. The site was too significant for the motif to be
merely decorative.41 With this iconographical background, the evolution
from "pregnant body" to "walking woman" and "woman on a boat" or
"woman on a chariot," and the equation of "standing woman" with "tree"
and with the myth of Life becomes clear.
The man looking at a tree reminds one, of course, of the male busts which
are— in The Sand and The Forest— mounted on the same platforms as the
tree-like women; the combination of a standing woman and a staring head
of a man is even more effective in another work of 1950, the Cage (fig. 3). It
17
%• 4
1 + 1=3. x934- Plaster. Private collection
seems to express one of the faculties of man, the faculty of thoughtful con-
templation or even of visionary understanding, which belongs to a seer or an
artist, or to the artist as seer.
Of the innumerable series of Giacometti's sculptures of heads, two are of
particular interest in this context: The Monumental Head, i960, (cat. no.
95) and the Cube, 1934, (cat. no. 34). For the Cube is, as Giacometti once
said to James Lord,42 a head. It was exhibited in Lucerne in 1935 with
the title Partie d'une sculpture ("part of a sculpture"), placed on a specially
made pedestal, as shown in Giacometti's sketch in the Pierre Matisse cata-
logue of 1947.43 On one of its facets the artist engraved a self portrait. The
Cube is thus the support for a portrait and, as such, a sculptural representa-
tion of an art-work; it is the sculpture of a portrait-head on a base. (The
Monumental Head of i960, which, incidentally, is the same size as the
Cube, is also represented on a base which rests on a plinth, and both elements
are integrated with the sculpture.) I do not know what other elements were
supposed to be included in the composition of which Cube was a part. In
the same year Giacometti had made a conical figure of a pregnant woman
with the self-explanatory title 1 + 1 = 3 (fig- 4) about which he wrote in 1947:
"A last figure, a woman called 1 + 1 = 3, for which I found no acceptable
artistic solution." That these two sculptures were meant to form a composi-
tion, together expressing the opposition of Art (artwork, the artist) and Life
is only a hypothesis, but at least the theme can be documented by the draw-
ing Lunaire (cat. no. 167), 1933. At the upper left is a desembodied human
head; at the lower right is a stereometric form very much resembling the
Cube. The whole sheet, except for the human head and a facet of the abstract
form, is carefully cross-hatched and resembles an engraving. Diirer's engrav-
ing Melancholy I, 15 14, was, in fact, the source for Giacometti's Cube; one
has but to reverse Giacometti's composition to see that the two polyhedrons
are identical. As Erwin Panofsky demonstrated,44 Diirer's Melancholy I is
28
an allegory of the artist's condition and melancholy temperament. Giaco-
metti's drawing also refers to the series The Sculptor's Studio from Picasso's
Vollard Suite. In one of these etchings, Model and Monumental Sculpted
Head, April i, 1933,45 Picasso shows a nude woman opposite a gigantic
sculpture of a bearded head, a composition which is quite similar to that of
Lunaire. In another, Sculptor and Kneeling Model, April 8, 1933,46 a bearded
artist contemplates his nude female model and an overturned sculpture of a
male head lies in the lower right corner. The sculptor's pose is visibly de-
rived from the pensive angel in Diirer's Melancholy I; while Diirer's alle-
gorical figure looks at the cube, Picasso's artist contemplates the living model,
having thrown his sculptured self portrait to the floor. It is a combination of
these elements which reveals the meaning of Giacometti's work.
Other quotations of Diirer's Melancholy 1 can be found in the Table (cat.
no. 31). Here the polyhedron on the left is opposed to the bust of a veiled
woman, and placed together with a stylized human hand and a bowl similar to
the bowl on the table in the foreground of Picasso's Model and Monumental
Sculpted Head. Giacometti's Table is obviously an artist's work table, and
quotations from works by modern artists, such as Brancusi, Leger, Laurens
and especially Magritte, make the meaning more pointedly contemporary.47
The original plaster of the Table contained a mortar and pestle,48 at least an
erotic piquanterie, and perhaps a reference to a broader theme. This element
is missing in the bronze cast. Since the Table was made for the Surrealist
Exhibition at Pierre Colle in June 1933, the work not only contains the oppo-
sition of art and reality in allegorical form— the opposition of "bodies that
attracted me in life and the abstract forms which I felt were true in sculpture,"
as Giacometti wrote in 1947— but places the artist's world (his work table
with the evidence of his occupation) in an exhibition room where living peo-
ple looking at it would oppose reality to art.
In this period, Giacometti used sculptural abbreviations to oppose to
man's faculties for contemplation and creation, his capacity for procreation.
In Three Figures Outdoors, 1929, (cat. no. 21) two males, characterized by
two spheres (heads) and two spikes (phalli), aggressively approach the
sculptural sign for woman. The theme is even more dramatically formulated
in the Cage, 1931 (cat. no. 23). The shape of a sphere recurs in Suspended
Ball, 1930, a composition which should be compared to Rodin's Eternal Idol,
1889,49 where a man, kneeling in front of a reclining woman, his hands be-
hind his back, leans his head forward to kiss her, without actually touching
her. This relationship between the sexes found an equally powerful expres-
sion in Giacometti's Circuit, 193 1 (cat. no. 16) where a sphere, endlessly
moving around the groove carved in the wooden board, will never reach its
goal, the cavity outside the circuit. In Palace at 4 a.m., Giacometti repre-
sented himself— according to his poetic account— as a combination of a
sphere and a phallic stele, placed in the middle of the construction between a
mother-figure, at left, and at right an abbreviated human skeleton in a cage
(a tomb) and a bird's skeleton— between procreation and death. This com-
position is, in fact, a sculptural adaptation of Boecklin's Isle of the Dead,
1880, in which the left and right sides are reversed. A phallic stele plus a half-
sphere as sign for a man's head, as in Man, 1929, (cat. no. 19), plus a cone
as cipher for a pregnant body are the main elements of Model for a Square,
19
I932- (fig- !)> together with a zigzag-shaped form which resembles a snake.
That it really is a snake is clearly visible in one of the sketches of Objets
mobiles et muets, 193 1, as well as in Brassai's photograph of Giacometti's
studio of 193 2, 50 which shows the same elements executed in plaster in monu-
mental size. For Model for a Square was, in fact, a project for a monumental
stone composition which was to be executed so that real persons could
traverse it or sit on the bench-like form which also appears in Model for a
Square.51 It is difficult not to read this composition as a metaphor for the
fundamental sexual and existential revelation as expressed in the biblical
myth of the Expulsion from Paradise.52
% 5
City Square, detail, 1948-49. Bronze
30
In his pre-War period, Giacometti never came any closer to a complex
mythical composition conceived as a large-scale monument. After the War,
Giacometti's male figures— except the Man Falling, 1950— are always walk-
ing: Walking Man, 1947; Three Men Walking, 1948; City Square, 1948; Man
Walking Quickly under the Rain, 1948; Man Crossing a Square, 1949 (cat.
nos. 47, 55, 56, 52, 57). They share with the sphere of Circuit, 1931, the con-
dition of being always on their way. The most complex of these composi-
tions is City Square, which has more in common with Model for a Square of
1932 than the mere similarity of titles. But before attempting any further
interpretation, we must consider the fact that between 1935 and 1946 Giaco-
metti studied the phenomenology of reality. He had ceased to do conceptual
sculptures and began to work after nature out of "the desire to make compo-
sitions with figures." If the phenomenological studies were undertaken in view
of compositions with figures, then their final result— the massless, weight-
less and elongated sculptures after 1946— is not only pertinent to problems of
perception and style, but to the inherent meaning of the compositional proj-
ects. We fully understand the attempt to make the figures of City Square be-
come doubles of reality when living persons are confronted with them. Then
the viewer recognizes in the art work an expression of his own condition, in
the same way a real person would have recognized his mythical ancestors in a
monumental enlargement of the 1932 Model for a Square.
As a consequence of this, we understand City Square essentially as a model
for a monumental project, and the Walking Men and Standing Women of
1947-49 as life-size studies for such a composition— Giacometti, in fact,
wrote "studies"53 on the back of photographs taken of them. When Gia-
cometti, many years later, looked at City Square (fig. 5) in the Kunstmuseum
Basel, he stood very close to the sculpture and saw the figures at eye-level.54
Seeing the work in this way, one shares the figure's space; one no longer per-
ceives them as tiny, but as life-size and the confrontation becomes a convinc-
ing, life-like experience. The viewer becomes a part of the composition.55
Fortunately, the meaning of this composition of four walking men placed
so that their paths will not cross the spot where the motionless woman stands
can be documented by Giacometti's own remarks:
In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or
painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they
approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form
and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity.^. . . The men
walk past each other without looking. Or they stalk a woman. A woman is
standing and four men direct their steps more or less toward the spot where
the woman is standing.''1 . . . It's the totality of this life that I want to repro-
duce in everything I Jo.58
The "totality of life" is the closest verbalization we can propose for the
mythical dimension of Giacometti's compositional ideas. We do not feel that
this "totality of life" refers only to a situation in the present, but to a universal
Present. This would have been the theme of the Chase Manhattan project.
In 1958, when the Chase Manhattan Bank considered placing a sculpture
on the Plaza in front of its new office building in New York, one of the pro-
posals was to ask Giacometti for a monumental enlargement of his Three
31
Men Walking. This enlargement would have included its platform and base.59
The artist could not agree,60 since base and platform characterize the Three
Men Walking as a small scale model for a plaza composition which, when
executed in monumental size, should place the figures directly on the pave-
ment of the real plaza, with only small plinths necessary to make them stand.
Giacometti submitted instead a new composition, for which he made the
small model figures in 1959 and the large Standing Woman, Walking Man
and Monumental Head mentioned in our introductory chapter, in i960.
We are now familiar with the metaphorical background of each of these
elements and can understand the mythical meaning of the group as a whole.
It contains in a single project the themes of several earlier compositions. The
Standing Woman is not merely an enlargement of the Standing Woman of
1947-49, but includes the meaning of the earlier walking and moving women
and of the tree equation of 1950. The Walking Man is not only man forever
on his way, but because of his life-size and his stylistic treatment as "double
of reality" he is the double of all the people crossing the Chase Manhattan
Plaza. The Monumental Head is a sculptured head on a pedestal — at once an
art-work, an allegorical portrait of the artist contemplating and "seeing" and
— as a formal quote of the Roman Colossal Head of Const antine— represents
Man's cultural heritage.61
When Giacometti placed the small model figures on the blueprints of the
site, he told Gordon Bunshaft, the architect, that they could be put anywhere
on the Plaza. He later said of his sculptures at his retrospective in Zurich in
1962 that they could be left wherever the deliverymen would put them.62 This
means that he had resolved the problem of sculptural perspective in advance,
having conferred by means of his style, upon each sculpture the effect of dis-
tance and the imprint of the spectator's point of view. This, in fact, is one of
the magnificent achievements of City Square of 1948, which "works" from
all sides. It is one of the problems he studied anew in the compositions
of the Squares, 1950, which he also called The Sand, The Forest and The
Glade. This inherent sculptural perspective would have been the key element
in making the Chase Manhattan group "work" on a site dominated by sky-
scrapers. It would also have made the group meaningful in its context with
real people, because it is an imaginary, a spiritual perspective. That Gia-
cometti, however, carefully arranged the installation of the group at the
Venice Biennale of 1962— and that his brother Diego supervised its installa-
tion at the exhibitions in Paris in 1969, and Rome in 1970— does not contra-
dict this idea, for the problem was then to make the group meaningful
among all the other works in these retrospectives.
For several reasons the Chase Manhattan project was not realized. One of
these may have been artistic: the commission for the project came at a mo-
ment, when the theme of a complex composition with several figures was for
the artist "already situated in the past," to quote the words Giacometti had
used about Chariot. The Women of Venice, 1956, are, in fact, the only group
composition together with the Project for a Monument to a Famous Man,
1956, (cat. no. 82). From 1954 on, Giacometti had concentrated on single
standing or seated figures and busts, and mainly on drawing and painting.
And after the period of transition, 1956-58, a new concept of the figure as well
as of space, had emerged. But as late as the summer of 1965, experimenting
31
with some new painting materials that a painter-friend had prepared for him,
Giacometti sketched, as if it were his personal emblem, a "seeing" head in
the foreground looking at the visionary scene of a motionless standing woman
placed very far away and a walking man crossing the empty space of a
Callot-like city square.63
In sculpture, Giacometti no longer needed metaphorical compositions to
express the mythical power inherent in his latest Busts of Diego and Busts of
Elie Lotar, 1964-65. They remind us of Samuel Beckett's novels— especially
of The Unnamable of 1953— where there is nothing but a speaking "I" at the
focal point of space and time; an "I" which relates to no myth, unless it cease-
lessly narrates its own history and myth; an "I" whose existence is pointless
unless the urge to think and speak, draw, paint and model, see, care and love
is understood as the force engendering the courage to go on living. This is
what Alberto Giacometti expressed poetically as his reality in a short text of
1957, Ma realite. Art, reality and the myth of Life became one.
Giacometti as Fainter
Giacometti's personal and unprecedented way of seeing things led to a paint-
ing style as original as that of his sculpture. Because Giacometti was a paint-
er's son, he had to negate his early training and reinvent the medium for
himself. His painting, consequently, falls into two main periods: the relatively
derivative years before 1933-35, and the epoch of his major paintings after
1935-37. Each period is distinguished by clearly discernible characteristics,
the most obvious of which are the use of color and his treatment of pictorial
space.
The stylistic evolution of his father Giovanni and his godfather Cuno
Amiet had been a reflection of the development of Impressionism into Post-
Impressionism and Symbolism, Fauvism and Expressionism. Growing up
with this artistic heritage, the young Giacometti understood that painting
was essentially the use of color in its structural, representational, composi-
tional and expressive functions. In the winter of 1919-20, his teacher at the
Geneva Academy, David Estoppey, a plein-air painter who had become a
Divisionist, taught him a more subtle brush handling than he had formerly
employed. But for several years Giacometti continued to utilize Post-Impres-
sionist arrangements of color planes to create pictorial space, and to model
according to a Cezannean technique of building up volume with a patchwork
of complementary colors and highlights.
When Giacometti arrived in Paris in 1922, painters there had long since
adopted Cubism and its revolutionary means of replacing illusionary three-
dimensionality in painting, and the Dada spirit was almost at the point of
transformation into Surrealism. But these movements were of little use to
Giacometti at this moment, since his preoccupation was to achieve more
structural solidity in his painting than Divisionism allowed. He therefore
studied Cezanne more closely. After 1925, he seems to have given up painting
in Paris altogether, although he continued to paint portraits and landscapes
when he returned each year to Stampa. There he experimented with solutions
he had reached in sculpture, as seen in the series of portraits of his father made
between 1927 and 1932 (for example, cat. no. 114) which should be com-
33
n
•• * ?
fig. 6
Study, c. 1935-36. Oil. Private collection,
Switzerland
pared to the various bronze Portraits of the Artist's Father of the same period
(cat. nos. 8, 9). In other paintings he still adhered to the Post-Impressionist
style,64 or emulated the elegant academicism of one of his new Parisian
friends, Christian Berard.65 These works leave no doubt about his qualifica-
tions as a genuine painter. Yet he had failed so far to find original post-
Cezannean solutions to the problem of representing imaginary volumes and
their surrounding space on the two-dimensional picture plane. This provoked
the transition from the first to the second period in his painting.
Surrealist pictorial space— whether that of Miro's conceptual fields, or
Tanguy's deeply recessed perspectives— did not offer him solutions to the
problems he faced in painting in the mid-thirties. Nor was abstraction a viable
alternative, since Giacometti wanted to represent real objects seen in real
space. There are, to our knowledge, no Surrealist paintings by Giacometti,
and only a few Surrealist drawings, together with some poems.66 As in the
evolution of his sculpture, studies after nature brought about a radical change
in Giacometti's painting. But we know of only one oil sketch from the years
between 1933 and 1937; a standing nude with a strictly frontal pose, the
hands close to the hips, and in the background a painted sculpture of a stand-
ing woman on a high pedestal, both of which are obviously studies for a
sculptural project (fig. 6).67
34
In 1937, Giacomctti painted two masterpieces which contain the germs of
every problem he was to deal with in his subsequent painterly evolution and
reveal, as well, the full measure of his capacities as a painter. These are Apple
(cat. no. 115) and Portrait of the Artist's Mother (cat. no. 116). In the treat-
ment of subject matter and brushwork, Giacometti relies on Cezanne's
methods. However, the space-concept, the use of grays and beiges as signs for
imaginary space and the almost strict frontality, which at once emphasizes the
picture plane and transcends it by making the figure seem almost to step out
of the canvas, are Giacometti's innovations. It would be an exaggeration to
say that the figure in Portrait of the Artist's Mother seems almost to sit in
front of the canvas, but a tendency toward this idea, later to become
fundamental to his painting, is certainly discernible. He pursued this treat-
ment of space as an alternative to Cubism. The construction of the head's
volume relates basically to Giacometti's post-Cubist drawings. The figure is
modelled as if light were falling on it asymmetrically;68 the shoulder on the
left casts a shadow on the background, thus creating an effect of space behind
the figure; white paint is used for highlighting, a technique Giacometti never
completely rejected. But there are also zones of white beside the elbow on
the left which represent neither light nor the continuation of the shadow on
the wall: they are early indications of Giacometti's use of white and gray as
non-colors to create pictorial space. Many of the vertical and horizontal
lines, seen also in Apple, have no representational meaning, but are vehicles
to create, as in a drawing, pictorial space.
No paintings seem to exist from the years 1938 to 1945, the period in
which Giacometti concentrated upon drawing to explore the rendering of
objects perceived at a distance. The year 1946 brought a new start exemplified
by Yellow Chair in the Studio (cat. no. 118). Chronological subdivisions of
Giacometti's subsequent painterly oeuvre can now be proposed, based on his
techniques for creating pictorial space. The suggested dates of these sub-
divisions should not be understood as absolute limits.
The real subject of the paintings of 1946 to 1949 is space, this three-dimen-
sional matter which has neither substance nor color, which is a sharply felt
presence, but can only be negatively located between and around the objects
which obstruct it. The simple subject matter— a corner of the studio with
furniture or a human figure presented at the same level of interest as an inani-
mate object and usually placed in recessed space— is primarily used as a ve-
hicle to represent space. These sketchy oils are rather like drawings on canvas,
with accents of colored lines usually on gray or brown backgrounds.
From this point on, Giacometti's grays should be understood primarily as
a means to indicate both interior and exterior space, and not as the rendering
of atmospheric effects or a carrier of mood. They are conceptual in quality-
like the black with which Giacometti drew lines of construction, and the
whites he used to indicate lights, highlights and projecting elements like the
tip of a nose. The pervasive aspect of gray, beige and brown became Gia-
cometti's painting style at the same time dematerialized figures became his
sculptural style. This use of neutral non-color is accompanied by the non-
representational use of short lines, which sometimes accumulate to form a
web between and crossing objects. The lines may stand for the traces of the
perceiving artist's eye, swiftly and incessantly moving around the composi-
35
tion from one object to another, measuring the distances between them.
Similarly, the dark construction lines indicate the act of observing objects
rather than defining outlines.
Around 1948, rapid foreshortening of parts of figures or objects became
Giacometti's method of rendering visual perspective. The legs of a seated
person seem too large, and the head, recessed in space, seems too small in
proportion to the torso. But we say "too large" and "too small" only in com-
parison to the traditional standards of figure painting and according to our
preconceptions of the objects. In attempting to paint an object receding in
space as the eye actually perceives it, free of involuntary mental correction,
Giacometti arrived at a "distortion" of proportions similar to that of the
camera lens which records foreground objects as seemingly too large.69
In the early fifties a technique became predominant which Giacometti had
always employed to some extent and which actually can be traced to Hodler.
This was the use of lines parallel to the edges of the canvas to frame the
composition. These border lines delineate the artist's field of vision when his
attention is fixed on the object in the center of this field and help bring the
painted motifs into proper relationship to the size and shape of the support.
The inner framing is thus the mediator between the Imaginary— the painted
object in its imaginary space and in its true phenomenological size— and the
Real, namely the whole painting as a picture and as part of our real space.
This mediating function became even more pronounced when Giacometti
transformed the inner framing into flat border zones or a multitude of con-
centric borders, which resemble the actual frame of a picture or a mirror. To
interpret the painted border as a suggestion of a mirror frame is of paramount
importance. If the image is seen as a reflection on the plane surface of a
mirror, it can be presented through traditional means of illusionary pers-
pective without violating the two-dimensionality of the pictorial surface. Gia-
cometti thus created a new concept of pictorial space, which might be called
"mirror space." Giacometti's mirror space does not pretend to be real, but
is immediately understood as imaginary space. Because he was so absorbed in
representing objects together with the space which separates them from us,
the most significant result for Giacometti of this mirror concept was the im-
pression that the figure depicted seemed to be double the normal distance
from the viewer— as the distance between a real object and the mirror it is
reflected in is also reflected and thus doubled. The distance between the
painted figure and viewer cannot be nullified or reduced, since the figure
seems to be located in the impenetrable space behind the mirror. Yet the
original of this reflection seems to exist on our side of the mirror; the pictorial
space seems to be the mirror-image of our own real space, thus providing the
painting with a strong existential link to the viewer.
An equally important existential link is produced by the impact of the
figures' strictly frontal poses and gazes. The precedent for these devices is
found in Symbolist portraiture; they were used in Giovanni Giacometti's
Self Portrait with Segantini's Funeral in the Background,10 1899, to express
the idea that the artist must face his destiny alone after his master's death.
Hodler definitively formulated the use of frontality in modern portrait paint-
ing. Alberto Giacometti progressed beyond Hodler, finding new techniques
for rendering frontal figures, and conferring new meaning upon frontality. He
36
brought the subject into an intense and real relationship with the viewer,
paralleling cinematic effects to a certain extent. (Giacometti, in fact, often
spoke quite critically of the illusionary quality of film.) When a filmed subject
looks into the camera, his eyes are directly linked to those of the viewer, and
the fiction of the filmed time and place is suddenly disrupted: the imaginary
space of the screen seems to become a part of the real space of the room. The
filmed subject is invested with the strongly felt quality of real presence and
becomes, in Giacometti's own words, "a double of reality."
Around 1954, the problem of creating pictorial space became secondary to
the representation of the figure as a believable reality. With a new technical
approach, Giacometti now painted the figures as apparitions rather than as
reflections of reality. He treated the canvas as if it were a magician's cloth,
painting it with nebulous, incorporeal grays, ranging from dark to light
shades. Heads or figures, delineated with a few black, gray and white strokes,
appeared like unexpected magical phenomena out of the center of ambiguous
backgrounds. We know from accounts of many models that Giacometti pro-
duced portraits very quickly, overpainting them with gray and recreating
them several times during a single sitting. The finished work seems but the
last in a series of equally accomplished states,71 as documented in photo-
graphs of various stages of evolving works. In a way the act of painting itself
was more important than the final result. Giacometti's goal was not to create
ever greater physical likeness in his portraits, but to spontaneously create the
apparition again and again, until it resembled, as nearly as possible, the
living presence, perceived at one glance, of the model. Giacometti's credo
was: "I am not attempting likeness but resemblance."
Giacometti's style of the mid-fifties may be characterized as the final em-
bodiment of his phenomenological approach to reality. However different
his paintings of the various phases of his evolution between 1946 and 1956
may be, in all of them the model was treated as a function of the artist's
visual perception of it at a given distance. In 1956 a crisis ensued which
lasted until 1958. It seems to have been triggered by problems he experienced
while painting portraits of his Japanese friend Isaku Yanaihara. His oriental
features called for at least a basic likeness and for a degree of personal iden-
tity which would not be entirely dependent on the artist's perception. Faced
with Yanaihara's exotic physiognomy, Giacometti realized that the sitter's
reality resided in himself rather than in the artist's concept of him as an
apparition. Typically for Giacometti, this problem led him to reconsider the
entire direction of his painting and brought forth a revision of his concept of
pictorial space.
The series of portraits of Yanaihara painted between 1956 and 1961, (for
example cat. no. 137) reveal the development of Giacometti's last style. As in
the bronzes, the painted figures seem more solid; the images more structured.
The head is presented as a sphere made up of curved lines, which, however,
rarely coincide with its outlines or features. The eyes, always important, are
given even more emphasis; the model's gaze, in fact, is now the subject matter
of the painting. Giacometti realized that the entire person participates in the
act of staring. It is not the anatomical description of the eye, but the coher-
ence of the complete face which confers upon the figure the force of a gaze—
this living proof of the model's active existence. The gaze itself cannot be
37
painted, but there, where the circling lines more or less leave the canvas un-
touched, the magical transformation of material painting into the immaterial
presence of the gaze takes place.
The figures and half-figures of this last period are often mere sketches,
richer in color than works of the preceding years. Giacometti created their
plastic and spatial credibility through a combination of curved lines leading
into depth, strong highlighting and modelling with a concentration of lines
for the darker parts. The pictorial space is characterized by superimposed
zones of beiges, grays and whites, which sometimes give the effect of a halo
encircling the entire figure. The head of a frontally seated model— more
distant from the viewer than the body — is drastically reduced in size and the
torso, the hands on the lap and the knees in the foreground act as props to
make the head recede even further. From this distant head an insistent stare
is projected towards the viewer.
The intensity of the model's gaze together with its frontality, confer upon
Giacometti's late portraits the spiritual power of a sacred image. Giacometti's
ultimate achievement as a painter consists in the treatment of a portrait as a
secular icon. In this respect he differs greatly from Cezanne. A Portrait of
Caroline, 1962-1965, may share with a Portrait of Madame Cezanne72 the
general compositional arrangement, the half-figure pose, though Cezanne's
models are never strictly frontal. In both paintings the oval curves formed by
the arms lead from the foreground into the middleground. These similarities
may not be completely fortuitous/3 but the effect is very different. Cezanne
had Madame Cezanne pose for him to allow him to make a good painting,
complete and satisfying in its formal qualities and in its representation of the
models features and personality. Giacometti, on the other hand, used all the
means of his artistic medium to give back to the model its unique presence: to
create a spiritual double of Caroline. He made of Caroline a sanctified
Madame Cezanne.
Giacometti's late paintings are among the masterpieces of modern art, for
in them are combined the qualities of all great painting: the abstract beauty
of painterly means, unceasing intensity of execution and, above all, the in-
exhaustible spirituality of the subject.
Giacometti as Draftsman
As a boy, Alberto Giacometti thought of his pencil as his weapon. He took
pride in the fact that he could draw absolutely anything and that he could do
it better than anybody else. A painter's son growing up in a farmers' village,
his superior talent for drawing provided him with self-assurance and special
status among his peers. He drew after nature with great skill and surprising
economy of means, and passionately copied Diirer's engravings and Rem-
brandt's etchings in the minutest detail. At the age of ten, he even signed
some of his drawings with an arrangement of his initials borrowed from
Diirer's monogram. His intimate and special relationship to drawing was part
of him for the rest of his life.
The style of Self Portrait (cat. no. 151), done at the age of seventeen,
which impresses us in its maturity, reflects his father's use of hatching with
thick or thin lines. The young Giacometti also adopted Hodler's practice of
38
rendering objects with an accumulation of delicately suggested lines rather
than simple outlines, thus creating a feeling of volume without definite de-
marcations. He also began to draw inner frames around his motifs.
During his studies in Paris, Giacometti surpassed his friends in his facility
in arriving at correct proportions by placing marks at key points of shapes
and connecting them with straight lines to divide volumes into planes or
facets. The effect of this boxing in of the object is rather academic and does
not render the appearance of reality. He abandoned this technique around
1925 but used it again in T935-36, to prevent his heads from dissolving as he
studied them.
From approximately 193 1 Giacometti cultivated two different drawing
styles. In Paris, when sketching the themes of his Surrealist sculptures or con-
tributing to Surrealist publications, he preferred a lean outline, like Picasso's
or Masson's. In Stampa, however, he began to explore the phenomenological
rendering of objects in front of him, a process revealed in a significant anec-
dote Giacometti told David Sylvester. He was copying pears on a table from
the distance normal for still-life drawing, yet the pears came out extremely
small in the middle of the sheet of paper. His father grew angry and said:
" 'But start doing them as they are, as you see them.' . . . Half an hour later
they were exactly the same size to the millimeter as the previous ones."74
Very small heads in the center of a sheet are also characteristic of Gia-
cometti's drawings of the later forties. They do not indicate a partial use of
the paper, as they would if they were traditional sketches, but result from the
identification of the whole sheet with the artist's field of vision.
Figure drawings of 1945-46, however, more often show the model as
extremely tall, dematerialized with blurred lines, as if out of focus; these are
the studies that led Giacometti to his post-War sculptural style, which con-
sequently may be characterized as drawing in space. Drawing was thus essen-
tial to Giacometti's stylistic evolution, but, more than that, it was essential to
his perception. Making copies of art works was his way of reading and under-
standing them. Drawing incessantly from nature was his way of relating to,
and recreating the objects of his perception.
Many drawings of the mid-fifties give the impression that the lines are but
traces of the moving eye, rather than outlines. With the calculated use of the
eraser, Giacometti created smudged gray areas outside or within the con-
tours, creating an effect of immateriality and space surrounding the objects.
Erasures in the eyes of a portrait head also served to confer on his drawings
the appearance of life in the gaze. The untouched areas of the paper function
at once as neutral support for the drawing and as the imaginary substance of
the subject and its surrounding space— a characteristic, of course, of all great
draftsmanship. Later drawings excell in a rhythmic and almost abstract use of
oval curves which surround, rather than delineate the motifs, a technique
again reminiscent of Hodler, and especially of Cezanne. In his very last
years, Giacometti's swift, uninhibited and caricature-like drawing style re-
calls Toulouse-Lautrec's. But the drawings of the last two decades reveal,
above all, Giacometti's distinctive and unique style in their graphic complex-
ity and beauty. They are meant as art works complete in themselves and, as
such, are widely appreciated. The motifs are taken from the artist's surround-
ings in Paris and Stampa: interiors, still lifes, landscapes. A surprisingly great
39
number depict Giacometti's sculptural works not only because they were
objects in his studios, but as one of the essential themes in his drawing. He
also incessantly filled scraps of paper with sketches of his sculptural motifs,
his models drawn from memory and accounts of his procedures for rendering
heads. The most comprehensive representation of his studio is the panoramic
view on two sheets of paper made in 1932 (cat. no. 164). These drawings, a
gift for the Countess Visconti, contain minute descriptions of each piece she
had seen during visits to the studio, which— according to the dedication line
on the bottom of the larger sheet, — "to my great pleasure you did not find
distasteful."
Giacometti drew other notable "inventories" of his sculpture and studio
for the catalogues of his exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948
and 1950, and at Maeght in 195 1, the latter drawn on transfer paper. It is as if
Giacometti, who constantly destroyed what he had modelled and painted
and ceaselessly evolved towards new visions and goals, used drawing to pre-
serve his achievement and confer unity upon his life and work.
Giacometti as Printmaker
Giacometti's graphic oeuvre is considerable, although he was not preoccu-
pied with the print medium itself. Like so many other artists, he learned
etching in the studio of Stanley William Hayter, the British printmaker work-
ing in Paris. There, in 1933 and 1934, Giacometti made three etchings— each
as unique artist's proofs or in an edition of not more than three— after three of
his sculptures: Cubist Head, The Invisible Object and Table.75 Other prints
were made as illustrations for the original editions of Rene Crevel's Les Pieds
dans le plat, 1933 (one engraving) and Andre Breton's L 'Air de I'eau, 1934
(four etchings76). The linear execution and Surrealist imagination of these
prints were much influenced by Andre Masson's illustrative drawings. In
1935, Giacometti contributed an etching for one of the most important avant-
garde print portfolios of this period, Anatole Jakovski's 23 Gravures. In it,
Giacometti combined some of the symbolic forms of his sculptures of
1930-33. 77
No etchings seem to have been produced between 1936 and 1947, when the
artist was asked to illustrate Georges Bataille's Histoires des rats and Pierre
Loeb's Regards sur la peinture?9. His prints were independent works with
subjects drawn from his surroundings (his studio) and current motifs. An
uninterrupted series of etchings and lithographs followed, published as
illustrations and hors-text suites in art periodicals, exhibition catalogues and
literary publications.
From 195 1 on, the lithographs, conceived as individual prints, greatly
outnumbered the etchings. The original drawings for these lithographs were
made with lithograph crayon on transfer paper rather than on stone. Using a
technique which did not allow for erasures was a challenge for Giacometti.
However, his primary concern was not with the unique demands and quali-
ties of the print medium, but the presentation of his subject matter— his studio
filled with sculptures, interiors with his wife and brother, and the familiar
rooms and landscapes of Stampa. Other artists like Picasso and Rouault
were actually more sensitive to the print medium than Giacometti.
40
Yet, during his last years, Giacometti executed a print series which re-
vealed his technical mastery of the medium. This series is the album Paris
sans fin (Paris without End) (cat. no. 217) commissioned by E. Teriade in
1957 and published in an edition of 250 in 1969 after Giacometti's death. The
portfolio consists of 150 lithographs and a very personal text by the artist.
The text was originally supposed to fill between 16 and 20 pages. In the
finished book, however, six pages are left blank, which gives it the appearance
of a fragment, although Giacometti had brought it to the point where nothing
remained to be said. Its fragmentary character and spontaneous and osten-
sibly unselective content is as deliberate a stylistic decision as the seemingly
random selection of views of Paris. Giacometti chose scenes of Paris that were
intimately connected with his life there: his living quarters and his studio, his
street, his neighborhood cafe, Montparnasse, friends and acquaintances,
erotic scenes, exhibition halls, parks, docks— Paris without end. Some of the
views through restaurant windows demonstrate an interesting use of letters to
distinguish and animate exterior and interior space.
The portfolio was often left untouched in the studio for weeks or months
at a time. During these months, the project changed in scope and meaning,
as the artist himself changed. He wrote:
There are 30 lithographs on my bed which have to be redone for the book
that 1 abandoned two years ago; I tried to take up some motifs as before:
street scenes, interiors— 1 don't like them any more. Where and how could
1 repeat them? Paris for me is only this: The attempt to understand a little
better the origin of the nose in a sculpture."
These new feelings threatened the whole undertaking: "I could as well copy
the back of the chair here, right in front of me . . . ."
As in his paintings and sculpture after 1958, a new spatial concept emerged.
Giacometti hints in his text that there is also a new time concept. The quote
continues:
. . . or the little alarm clock, black and round on the table which fills— no, it
does not actually fill the room, but which is like a spot from which orig-
inates everything one sees, the windows as well as the ceiling, the tree out-
side, where the blackbird sings early at dawn, or just before dawn— a song
which in June of last year, 1963, was for me the greatest joy of the day, of
the night ....
Thus we see that everything radiates from the alarm clock, once it has become
the focus of the artist's attention. It is the focal point of both space and time,
for everything— the experience of both the interior and the courtyard, as well
as of both the present time and the remembrance of times past— springs
from it.
Paris sans fin, together with the busts of Annette of c. i960 to 1964, Diego
and Elie Lotar of 1964 and 1965, and the paintings of Caroline of this period,
forms Giacometti's artistic and personal testament. Giacometti left Paris for
the last time on December 5, 1965. He was to die in Chur, Switzerland on
January 11, 1966. Shortly before his last departure, he wrote these evocative
lines as the last paragraph of Paris sans fin:
41
The silence, I'm alone here, outside the night, nothing moves and sleep
takes over again. I don't know who 1 am, nor what I'm doing, nor what I
would like to do, I don't know if I'm old or young, maybe I still have some
hundred thousand years to live until my death, my past sinks in a gray
abyss ....
In 1932 — almost in the middle of his life— he had written metaphorically
of his existence as a fragile palace which he built and rebuilt with match-
sticks.79 Now, at the end of his life, he concluded with these words: ". . . and
those matchsticks dispersed on the floor, isolated here and there, like battle-
ships on the gray ocean."
Reinhold Hohl
42.
The author wishes to acknowledge
how much he profited in his Giaco-
metti studies from conversations
with James Lord, Paris, who is cur-
rently writing a biography of Alberto
Giacometti, and Michael Brenson,
Gainesville, Florida, who is preparing
a Ph.D. thesis on Giacometti's sculp-
ture 1925-1935 for The Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore.
References which appear in the
selected bibliography are given in
abbreviated form.
1 Giacometti spoke about the impos-
sibility of ever arriving at his goal in
many interviews after i960. See for
instance: Ludy Kessler, Conversa-
tion with Alberto Giacometti,
Swiss Television, Lugano, 1964;
partially reprinted in Giorgio Soavi,
"II Sogno di una testa," Playmen,
vol. Ill, Rome, January 1969, p. 153.
2 Information about Giacometti's
Chase Manhattan project from a
conversation with Gordon Bun-
shaft, New York, June 1973.
3 A discussion about the formation of
this compositional idea follows in
the chapter "Some Continuing
Compositional Ideas in the Sculp-
ture," especially pp. 29 to 33.
4 Lord, L'Oeil, 1966, p. 67.
5 Communication to the author from
Gordon Bunshaft; also James Lord,
see note 4, and Hess, Art News,
1966.
6 In a conversation with Ernst
Beyeler, Basel, November 1965;
verbal communication to the author
from Mr. Beyeler.
7 See facsimile reproduction in the
1948 Pierre Matisse Gallery cat-
alogue, p. 31.
8 Unpublished letters of Giovanni
Giacometti to Cuno Amiet, January
30 and March 14, 1920. Cuno Amiet
Archive, Mrs. Lydia Thalmann-
Amiet, Oschwand, Switzerland.
9 According to the most pointed of
various apocryphal accounts. See
also the chronologies by George
Mauner in the exhibition catalogue
Three Swiss Painters, Museum of
Art, The Pennsylvania State
University, 1973, pp. 79, 128.
10 The translation in the 1950 Pierre
Matisse Gallery catalogue unfor-
tunately does not make a clear
distinction between the two texts.
What seems to have been the first
text begins with the second para-
graph of p. 5 and continues on pp.
6 and 9; the French original, ac-
companied by sketches, is on pp. 8,
10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24. "Today's
letter" translated is on p. 3 and
first paragraph of p. 5.
n Minotaure, 1933.
12 "A propos de Jacques Callot,"
Labyrinthe, 1945.
13 James Lord, "Scarnificava la
materia per cercare il segreto dell'
uomo," Bolaffiarte, vol. IV, no. 29,
Turin, April-May 1973, p. 56. In
this context see also Giacometti's
remarks about drawing a glass as
reported by Sylvester, Tate Gallery,
1965, last page of the essay.
14 Carluccio, Alberto Giacometti, A
Sketchbook of Interpretative
Drawings, 1968, p. IX.
15 Clay, Realites, April 1964.
16 Le Reve, le sphinx et la mort de T.
17 Unpublished letter of March 1915.
Cuno Amiet Archive, Mrs. Lydia
Thalmann-Amiet, Oschwand,
Switzerland.
18 See note 1.
43
19 This quality is already visible in the
post-Cubist Torso: the groove on
the back indicating the spine would
not be found in a work by Laurens
or Lipchitz, but is common in
primitive carvings. Giacometti re-
peated it in 1934 on the back of the
almost abstract tombstone of his
own father in the cemetery of S.
Giorgio di Borgonovo.
20 In his series of sketches Objets
mobiles et tnuets, 193 1, Giacometti,
in fact, translated some of the
"characters" in Miro's Harlequin's
Carnival, 1924-2.5, Collection The
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo,
N.Y., into projects for wire sculp-
tures—not unlike Calder's wire
constructions of around 1930—
which he simply proposed to place
on a table-like platform.
21 For a thoroughly documented dis-
cussion of the problem of bases in
modern sculpture see Albert Elsen,
"Pioneers and Premises of Modern
Sculpture," Pioneers of Modern
Sculpture, London, Arts Council,
Hayward Gallery, July 20-Septem-
ber 23, 1973, exhibition catalogue.
See also Jack Burnham, Beyond
Modern Sculpture, New York,
Braziller, 1968, third printing 1973.
22 An interesting comparison can be
made with Calder's wire construc-
tion Motorized Mobile, 1929,
Collection The Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
Whereas Calder's work is like a
drawing in space, Giacometti's
Three Figures Outdoors has the
sculptural and emotional qualities
of the grill-like Ivory Coast Senufo
dancer's headdresses. Giacometti's
Suspended Ball, 1930, extends
Calder's Motorized Mobile into the
three-dimensional space frame of a
cage; the shape of the ball and the
crescent were inspired by Picasso's
drawing Project for a Monument,
1928, Private Collection.
23 Point to the Eye, 1932 (fig. 7) — a
pointed cone directed to a modelled
skull mounted on the same plat-
form—is in the same way a pre-
figuration of The Nose, 1947 (cat.
no. 51), where it is the viewer's own
eye which is threatened by the point
of the nose when standing in front
of the sculpture. This development
of a sculptural theme demonstrates
the evolution of Giacometti's work
from the Surrealistic model-situa-
tions to real Existential confronta-
tions.
24 Andre Breton, Documents 34, June
1934-
25 Series of models at the Val de
Grace Museum, Paris.
26 Circle, International Survey of Con-
structive Art, Ed. J. L. Martin, B.
Nicholson, N. Gabo, London, 1937.
Reprinted, New York, Praeger,
I97i.pl- !7, P-2-97-
27 In the same period, the French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty undertook similar phenom-
enological studies about perception;
for the relationship between ap-
parent size and the field of vision
see his Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, 1945, English translation by
Colin Smith, London, Routledge &c
Kegan Paul, 1962, 1967, pp.
259-261.
28 Photographs of the plasters in cat-
alogue insert, Derriere le miroir, no.
39-40, Paris, June, 1951.
29 In formal analysis of Head of a Man
on a Rod, one must— as for Gia-
cometti's sculptures of the early
thirties— refer to Oceanic works,
namely New Hebrides human
skulls, which were covered with
wax, chalk and seashells and
painted— as well as to modern art.
It relates to the expressive silhou-
ettes in Picasso's Guernica, 1937
and the stalk carrying a bull's head
in Picasso's Still Life with Red Bull's
Head, 1938, both Collection The
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
the latter a painting for which
Picasso borrowed the overall com-
position and the polyhedron from
Giacometti's Table, 1933. We think
that the meaning of Head of a Man
on a Rod is illuminated by a discus-
sion of these formal origins.
30 Carola Giedion-Welcker, "Alberto
Giacometti's Vision der Realitat,"
Werk, Winterthur, 1959, pp. 205 ff.
3 1 Sylvester, The Sunday Times
Magazine, July 1965.
32 Giacometti constantly used the term
"double of reality" and the formula
"not likeness, but resemblance"
fig. 7 Point to the Eye. 1931. Collection E. Teriade, Paris.
44
in his later years. See for instance
his conversation with Jean-Luc
Daval, "Fou de Realite: Alberto
Giacometti," Journal de Geneve,
June 8, 1963.
33 Radio interview with Georges
Charbonnier, Paris, R.T.F., March
3, 195 1 ; reprinted in Charbonnier,
he monologue du peintre, Paris,
Juillard, 1959, pp. 159-170. Also in
many other conversations, the last
one with Jacques Dupin in the film
Alberto Giacometti by Scheidegger
and Miinger, 1966.
34 Luigi Carluccio, op. cit., p. 141,
pi. 52.
35 Such interpretations (by Jacques
Dupin and Palma Buccarelli) were
refuted by Kramer, Arts Magazine,
November 1963.
36 Conversations with Italian journal-
ists, quoted by Mario de Micheli,
"E morto lo scultore Alberto Gia-
cometti," L'Unitd, Rome, January
13, 1966. Also in a later conversa-
tion with Lake, The Atlantic,
September 1965, pp. 121-122.
37 Conversation with Grazia Livi,
"Interroghiamo gli artisti del nostro
tempo: Che cosa ne pensano del
mondo d'oggi ? Giacometti,"
Epoca, no. 643, Milan, January 20,
1963, PP- 58-61.
38 See 1948 Pierre Matisse Gallery
catalogue, p. 28 (ill. drawing
Tightrope Walker) and p. 40 (ill.
now destroyed plaster Night).
39 Femme dans une barque, 1950,
Bronze, Private Collection, Paris.
Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries,
Alberto Giacometti, 1969-70, ex-
hibition catalogue, no. 72, ill. p. 71
(dated 1950-52).
40 Photograph by Man Ray repro-
duced, Cahiers d 'Art, Paris, T932,
p. 341, with caption Chute d'un
corps sur un graphique (Fall of a
Body onto a Diagram); sketched by
Giacometti in the 1947 letter to
Pierre Matisse and titled Espece de
paysage—tete couchee (Sort of a
Landscape— Reclining Head).
41 On the tombstone for his own
father, 1934, Giacometti had used
the traditional Christian metaphor
for the expectation of Eternal Life,
sculpted in delicate relief: a bird
on a branch next to a chalice; above
the chalice is the sun, above the
bird a star.
42 Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, 1965,
p. 49.
43 Photograph of Cube with original
base, Minotaure, no. 5, Paris, 1934,
p. 42 (with caption Nocturnal
Pavilion); reprinted in Circle,
London, 1947; reprinted, New
York, Praeger, i97i,p. 94, pi. 18.
This photograph and Giacometti's
sketch of 1947 do not show the
engraved self portrait, which, for
physiognomical and stylistic rea-
sons, can be dated 1936-38.
44 Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Diirer,
Princeton University Press, 194S,
vol. I, pp. 156-171.
45 Bloch Catalogue no. 170.
46 Bloch Catalogue no. 178.
47 Compare one of the front legs with
Brancusi's theme The Endless
Column; compare the female bust
with Leger's watercolor Woman
and Table, 1920, Private Collection,
Germany, and the woman, as well
as the mortar with pestle, with
Leger's Three Women, 1921, Col-
lection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Bust and braid-like
table leg refer also to Laurens'
sculptures. The most important
source for the table, the contrasting
legs and the human hand, was,
however, Magritte's painting The
Difficult Passage, 1926, Private
Collection, Brussels.
48 See reproduction in Dupin, Alberto
Giacometti, 1962, pp. 214-215.
49 Plaster, Musee Rodin, Paris.
50 Reproduced in he Surrealisme au
service de la revolution, December
193 1, pp. 18-19; Brassai's photo-
graph reproduced in Minotaure,
no. 3-4, Paris, 1933, p. 47 f.
51 According to Giacometti's 1947
letter to Pierre Matisse.
52 Tanguy used similar elements in his
painting Genesis, 192.6, Claude
Hersent Collection, Meudon; see
Kay Sage Tanguy, Yves Tanguy. A
Summary of His Works, New York,
Pierre Matisse, 1963, pi. 26.
53 Photographs made by Giacometti's
friend Charles Ducloz in the archive
of Mrs. Carola Giedion-Welcker,
Zurich; a tall Standing Woman,
1948, placed at Giacometti's request
on the sidewalk of the rue Hippo-
lyte Maindron, is reproduced in
her book Contemporary Sculpture:
An Evolution in Volume and Space,
New York, Wittenborn, 1955, p. 94;
revised edition i960, p. 104.
54 Communication to the author from
Dr. Carlo Huber, Basel.
55 Proceeding from this premise, the
obligatory comparison with Rodin's
Burghers of Calais, 1886, neces-
sarily leads to a different conclusion
than Albert Elsen's in his Rodin,
New York, The Museum of
Modern Art, 1963, pp. 86-87. Ex-
ecuted as a monument in life-size
on a public square, and without the
base, Giacometti's City Square
would be very much like The
Burghers of Calais, about which
Rodin confided to Paul Gsell, that
one of his original plans had been
"to fix my statues one behind the
other on the stones of the Place,
before the Town Hall of Calais . . .
[so that] the people of Calais of
today, almost elbowing them,
would have felt more deeply the
tradition of solidarity which unites
them to these heroes." (Rodin, On
Art and Artists, New York, Phil-
osophical Library, 1957, pp. 103-
104.)— It is very likely that Gia-
cometti was much more aware
of Rodin's works than one will
ever be able to document. Parallels
in the works of both artists differ
essentially in their iconographical
dimension: Rodin's is more often
historical and literary, Giacometti's
philosophical and mythical.
56 Conversation with Jean-Raoul
Moulin, quoted in J.-R. Moulin,
"Giacometti: 'Je travaille pour
mieux voir'," Les lettres francaises,
no. 1 1 15, Paris, January 20, 1968,
p. 17.
57 Conversation with Pierre Schneider,
quoted in P. Schneider, " 'Ma
longue marche' par Alberto Gia-
cometti," L' Express, no. 521, Paris,
June 8, 1961, pp. 48-50.
58 See note 56.
59 See note 2.
60 Sigfried Giedion, "Alberto Gia-
cometti," Neue Ziircher Zeitung,
January 16, 1966.
45
61 The colossal head of a giant bronze
statue of the Emperor Constantine
—since 1594 at the Conservatori
Museum on the Capitole where
Giacometti saw it on a trip to Rome
in, or shortly before, i960— was of
enormous political and cultural
significance for the city. The head,
placed on a marble pedestal, stood
for centuries on the site which was
to become the Piazza del Cam-
pidoglio, amidst other sculptural
fragments, where people constantly
moved. Whether Giacometti knew
about the public site is not impor-
tant; what is significant, is the strik-
ing parallel of the meaningful urban
situation which he intended to
create on the Chase Manhattan
Plaza.
62 Verbal communication to the
author from Bruno Giacometti,
Zurich.
63 Collection Dr. Paolo Cadorin, Basel.
64 Examples are: Partner's Wife from
Bregaglia, 1928, Private Collection,
Lugano. Landscape near Stampa,
193 1, Collection Josef Miiller,
Solothurn; color reproduction on
cover of Der Schweizerische
Beobachter, no. 4, Basel, 1970.
65 For instance: Portrait of Renato
Stampa, 1932, Collection Prof. R.
Stampa, Chur.
66 When Giacometti followed the
Surrealist practice of reshaping
traditional paintings into Dada and
Surrealist expressions (such as de
Chirico's interpretations of Boeck-
lin, Duchamp's Mona Lisa varia-
tion, Miro's Dutch Interior and
Dali's "paranoid" readings of post-
card views), he did so as a sculptor
rather than a painter. He translated
Duchamp's The Passage from the
Virgin to the Bride into the plaster
model Project for a Passageivay,
1930-31, Collection The Alberto
Giacometti Foundation, and Boeck-
lin's Island of Dead into the stage
construction Palace at 4 a.m., 1932,
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, or Magritte's The
Difficult Passage into Table, 1933,
(cat. no. 31).
67 Private Collection, Switzerland.
The model for this oil seems to be
Rita Gueffier, an identification
which allows the tentative dating of
1935 or 1936. Such elements as
frontality, perpendicular light-
source, interior walls and open
doors parallel to the picture plane,
as well as the ambiguous treatment
of outlines, have precedents in
Ferdinand Hodler's later painting.
68 The author gratefully acknowledges
that he began to investigate the
problem of Cubism and frontality
in Giacometti's portrait-painting
after a conversation with Jonathan
Silver, New York, who in his un-
published essay "Frontality and
Cubism in Giacometti's Painting
1947-1951" (suggested by Meyer
Schapiro, Columbia University,
New York) presents Giacometti's
paintings as an adaptation of,
rather than an alternative to
Cubism.
69 The Mannerists of the sixteenth
century had created strange distor-
tions and dramatic depth using this
approach. Cezanne's Boy with a
Red Vest — his seemingly too long
arm reaching from the middle-
ground into the foreground— is per-
haps the most famous modern
example of this representational
device, and one Giacometti often
spoke of; see for instance Carlton
Lake, "The Wisdom of Giacometti,"
The Atlantic, Boston, September
1965, p. 123.
70 Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.
71 Yanaihara, Derriere le miroir, 1961;
Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, 1965,
reproduces twelve of the sixteen
states of Portrait of James Lord,
1964; Dupin, Alberto Giacometti,
1962, reproduces four states of
Head of Diego, 1957.
72 For instance Madame Cezanne in
the Conservatory, Venturi, no. 569
or Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress,
Venturi, no. 570, both c. 1890, both
at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
73 Giacometti's conversations
abounded in remarks about Ce-
zanne, and one may say that it was
Cezanne's art that Giacometti chal-
lenged in his painting. See especially
Georges Charbonnier's radio inter-
view, Paris, R.T.F., April 16, 1957,
published as "[Deuxieme] Entre-
tien avec Alberto Giacometti," G.
Charbonnier, Le Monologue du
peintre, Paris, Juillard, 1959,
pp. 171-183.
74 Sylvester, Tate Gallery, 1965. As
told by Giacometti to Mr. Sylvester,
the incident took place when the
artist was eighteen or nineteen. It
was so described in the "Documen-
tary Biography" in my monograph
on Giacometti, New York, 1972,
p. 231. But since not one of the
many surviving drawings done be-
fore 1925 shows traces of this
phenomenological rendering, we
discuss it here in the context of a
later period. A painting by Giovanni
Giacometti of 1931 shows Alberto
in the family room drawing a plate
of fruit (Giacometti Estate, Zurich;
Kohler catalogue no. 421).
75 Verbal communication to the
author from Michael Brenson after
his interview with Stanley W.
Hayter. Herbert Lust, in his
Giacometti: The Complete
Graphics and 15 Drawings, lists
Cubist Head (L. 56, pi. 92) and
Hands Holding a Void (L. 57,
pl-93)-
76 Lust, ibid., L. 76-79, pi. 112.
77 Lust, ibid., L. 80 (as no. 7 instead
of no. 8 in the album), pi. 113.
78 Lust, ibid., L. 81-83, p'- ri4)
L. 85-91, pi. 115 (with the date
of publication, 1950; Edwin Engel-
berts gives the date of execution,
1947, in his exhibition catalogue
Alberto Giacometti. Dessins,
Estampes, Livres illustres, Geneva,
1967, p. 51, nos. 26-29).
79 Commentary on Palace at 4 a.m.;
see note 11.
46
Works in the Exhibition
Sculpture
Torso (Torse). 192.5
Bronze, 22V4 x 10% x 7V2"
(56.5 x 24.5 x 23 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation, Relinquished from
Kunsthaus Zurich
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base back "5/6 Alberto
Giacometti 1925"
48
Litte Crouching Man
(Petit bomme accroupi). 1926
Bronze, 1 1 Va x 6% x 4"
(28.5 x 17.5 x 10 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation, Gift of the artist
Inscribed: base left side "A. Gia-
cometti; base front "192.6"; base back
right "M Pastori Cire perdue"
Spoon Woman (Femme-cuiller). 1926
Bronze, 57V& x 20V2 x 97/s"
(145 x 52 x 25 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base right "A. Giacometti
1/6"; middle plate back "Alberto
Giacometti 1/6"; base left "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
49
Couple (Man and Woman)
(Le Couple (Homme et femme)). 1926
Bronze, z35/s x 14 V2 x jVs"
(60 x 37 x 18 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plinth back right "A. Giaco-
metti 1/6"; plinth back left "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
Cubist Composition (Man)
(Composition cubiste (Homme)). 1926
Bronze, 25 lU" h. (h. 64 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plinth right side "1/6
Alberto Giacometti"; plinth back
"Cire C. Valsuani perdue"
50
Personages (Personnages). 1926-27
Bronze, 10V4 x y7/s x 57/s"
(26 x 20 x 15 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: base front left "C Valsuani
Cire perdue"
Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Portrait
de la mere de I' artiste). 1927
Bronze, i23/4 x 9 x 4V2"
(32.5 x 23 x 11 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: base front "1927"; base
back "Alberto Giacometti"; base left
side "M Pastori Cire perdue"
5i
8
Portrait of the Artist's Father (Portrait
du pere de I' artiste). 1927
Bronze, nVs x 8V4 x 9"
(28.5 x 21 x 23 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation, Gift of the artist
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: back left "M Pastori Cire
perdue"
10
Sculpture (Sculpture). 1927
Plaster, 12V2" h. (h. 32 cm.)
Collection The Philadelphia Museum
of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection
Inscribed: upper back right vertically
"Alberto Giacometti Paris 1927"
52-
Portrait of the Artist's Father (Portrait
du pere de I' artiste, plat et grave). 1927
Bronze, 10% x 8V2 x 5%"
(27.5 x 21.5 x 13.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: bottom left "M Pastori Cire
perdue"
53
Composition (Man and Woman)
(Composition (Homme et femme)).
192.7
Bronze, i53/4 x i43/4 x 5"
(40 x 37.5 x 13 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: left side and right side "Cire
L Pastori Cerdue"; back "Giacometti
1/6"
12
Observing Head (Tete qui regarde).
19x7-28
Bronze, 15V2 x 14 x 2V2"
(39-5 x 35-5 X6.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: plinth front left "Alberto
Giacometti 3/6"; plinth back left
"Susse fondeur Paris"
54
13
Observing Head (Tete qui regarde).
1927-29
Marble, 16 Vs x 14 V2 x 3 Vs "
(41 x 37 x 8 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Executed in marble by Diego
Giacometti
Inscribed: plinth back left "Alberto
Giacometti"
55
14
Woman (Femme). 192.8
Marble, 13V4 x 12V4 x 3V2"
(33.5 x31x9 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Executed in marble by Diego
Giacometti
Inscribed: base back left "A.
Giacometti"
56
15
Woman (Femme). 192.8
Bronze, i87/s x 15 x 3%"
(48 x 38 x 8.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base back left "Alberto
Giacometti 2/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
57
i6
Man and Woman (Homme et femme).
1928-29
Bronze, 18 Vs" h. (h. 46 cm.)
Collection Henriette Gomes, Paris
Unique cast
Inscribed: base "Alberto Giacometti"
58
17
Reclining Woman (Femme couchee).
192.9
Bronze, io5/8 x 17V4 x 6lA"
(27 x 44 x 16 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base back right "Alberto
Giacometti 1929 1/6"
18
Reclining Woman who Dreams
(Femme couchee qui reve). 1929
Painted bronze, 9V2 x 17 x 5V2"
(24.5 x 43 x 14 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 0/6
Inscribed: base back left "Alberto
Giacometti 0/6"
59
19
Man (Homme). 1929
Bronze, ij^xiix 3%"
(40 x 30.5 x 8.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: lowest transverse beam back
"2/6 Alberto Giacometti 1929"
60
Portrait of Giovanni Giacometti
(Portrait de Giovanni Giacometti).
1929-30
Bronze, 10% x 8!/4 x 9V2"
(27.5 x 21.5 x 24 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Inscribed: lower left "Alberto
Giacometti 1929-30"
21
Three Figures Outdoors (Trois
personnages dehors). 1929
Bronze, 20 Vi x^'^x 3V2"
(51.5 x38.5 x9 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Unique cast
Inscribed: inside plinth "Epreuve
unique"
61
22
Suspended Ball (Boule suspendue).
1930-31
Plaster with metal, 24 x 14V& x 13V4"
(61 x 36 x 33.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: plate edge left side "Platre
original Alberto Giacometti"; plate
right side "Alberto Giacometti"
1
1
j
ta^L
J^PA
^^^
^M
V^i-c
j "
„^:.~.: -^^?> ff36*!
^^^
62
*3
Cage (La Cage). 1 93 1
Wood, 19V4" h. (h. 49 cm.)
Collection Moderna Museet,
Stockholm
Unique cast
Not inscribed
63
2-4
Disagreeable Object (Objet
desagreable). 193 1
Wood, 19" long (1.48.5 cm.)
Private Collection, New York
Not inscribed
2-5
Disagreeable Object to be Disposed Of
(Objet desagreable a jeter). 193 1
Wood, 8V4" h. (h. 21 cm.)
Penrose Collection, London
Not inscribed
64
26
Circuit (Circuit). 19 31
Wood, i8Vfcxi8Vix2"
(47 x47 x5 cm.)
Collection Henriette Gomes, Paris
Not inscribed
65
2-7
Caress {Car esse). 1932
Marble, 19V4" h. (h. 49 cm.
Private Collection
Not inscribed
66
28
Woman with her Throat Cat (Femme
egorgee). 1932
Bronze, yVs x 29V2 x 227/8"
(20 x 75 x 58 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 3/5
Inscribed: under shovel left "A.
Giacometti 1932 3/5"; "Alexis Rudier
Fondeur Paris"
67
2-9
Walking Woman (Femme qui marche).
1932-34
Bronze, 59" h. (h. 150 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Henry Lee Higginson and
William Francis Warden Funds
Cast no. 4/4
Inscribed: right "Alberto Giacometti"
30
Statue of a Headless Woman (Femme
sans tete). 1932.-36
Bronze, 58V2" h. (h. 148.5 cm.)
Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Cast no. 0/6
Inscribed: base "Alberto Giacometti
1932-36"
68
3i
Table (La Table surrealiste). 1933
Bronze, 56VV' h. (h. 143 cm.)
Collection Musee National d'Art
Moderne, Paris
Unique cast executed from 1933 plaster
original for Musee National d'Art
Moderne, Paris in 1969
Inscribed: back left "Alberto
Giacometti, 1933"
69
3*
Flower in Danger (Fleur en danger).
1933-
Wood, plaster, metal, zi7/s x 3o3/4 x
7V6" (55.5x78.5x18 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: base front right in pencil
"Alberto Giacometti"
70
33
The Invisible Object (Hands Holding
the Void) (L'Objet invisible (Mains
tenant le vide)). 1934
Gilt bronze, 60V4" h. (h. 153 cm.)
Collection National Gallery of Art,
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund 1974
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: base top back "Alberto
Giacometti 1935"; base right back
"3/6 Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
7i
34
Cube (Le Cube). 1934
Bronze, 37 x 23% x 23 Vs"
(94 x 60 x 60 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/2
Inscribed: front left "Alberto
Giacometti 1/2"; back "Susse Fondeur
Paris"
7i
35
Cubist Head (Tete cubiste). 1934
Plaster, fk x 814 x 7V2"
(18 x 21 x 19 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: bottom right "Alberto
Giacometti"
73
36
Cubist Head (Tete cubiste). 1934
Bronze, 7" h. (h. 18 cm.)
Collection The Art Institute of
Chicago, Gift of Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: lower edge right "Alberto
Giacometti"
74
37
Cubist Head (Tete cubiste). 1934
Marble, 7 5/4"h. (h. 20 cm.)
Private Collection, New York
Not inscribed
75
Head of Isabel (Tete d'lsabel). 1936
Bronze, 11 V2" h. (h. Z9 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: bottom left "Susse Fondeur
Paris"; back bottom "6/6 A.
Giacometti"
76
39
Woman with Chariot I (Femme au
chariot 1). 1942-43
Bronze, 6^A" h. (h. 167 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery, New
York
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: top base right "3/6 Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur Paris"
77
4o
Group of Three Plasters (Groupe de
trois pldtres)
a. 1944, iVs" h. (h. z.8 cm.); with base,
2.3/4 x 1V4 x iVs" (7 x z.8 x 3 cm.)
b. c. 1945, V2" h. (h. 1.2. cm.); with
base, 5 x z3/s x zVi" (iz.8 x 5.5 x 7 cm.)
c. c. 1945, 1" h. (h. z.5 cm.); with base,
35/8 x i5/8 x iVs" (9.Z x 4 x 4 cm.)
Private Collection
Not inscribed
78
4i
Figurine (Figurine), c. 1945
Plaster and metal, 4V2" h. (h. 11.4 cm.);
with base, 3 ¥2 x z x zVs"
(8.9 x 5 x 5.2 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas B. Hess, 1966
Not inscribed
79
42-
Figurine (Figurine), c. 1945
Plaster and metal, 33/i" h. (h. 9.5 cm.);
with base, zlA x 1 V\ x 1V4"
(5.6 x 4.3 x 4.2 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas B. Hess, 1966
Not inscribed
44
Figurine (Figurine), c. 1945
Plaster and metal, 1%" h. (h. 4.3 cm.;
with base, 7/g x 1V2 x iV»"
(2.1 x 3.6 x 2.9 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas B. Hess, 1966
Not inscribed
43
Figurine (Figurine), c. 1945
Plaster and metal, zVs" h. (h. 5.4 cm.);
with base, 1% x 1V2 x iVs"
(3.3 x 3.8 x 4.1 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas B. Hess, 1966
Not inscribed
45
Figurine (Figurine), c. 1945
Plaster and metal, i5/s" h. (h. 4 cm.);
with base, Vs x V2 x Vz"
(1.6 x 1.2 x 1.2 cm.)
Collection The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas B. Hess, 1966
Not inscribed
80
46
Hand (La Main). 1947
Bronze, Z2.V2 x 28% x 1V4"
(57 x72 x3.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: shoulder "AG 5/6"
81
47
Walking Man (Homme qui marche).
1947
Bronze, 6yVs x 9V4 x zoVs"
(171 x 23.5 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base back "A. Giacometti
1/6 1947; base back bottom "Alexis
Rudier Fondeur Paris"
48
Head of a Man on a Rod (Tete
d'homme sur tige). 1947
Bronze and plaster, zi'/i" h.
(h. 55.5 cm.)
Collection William N. Eisendrath, Jr.
Cast no. 1/6
Not inscribed
1
82
49
Large Figure (Grande figure). 1947
Bronze, 79V2 x 85/s x i63/g"
(202 x 22 x 41.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation, Relinquished from
Kunsthaus Zurich
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base left side "Alberto
Giacometti 1/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
50
Man Pointing (L'Homme an doigt).
1947
Bronze, light patina, 70V2" h.
(h. 179 cm.)
Collection Sheldon H. Solow
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: base left "A Giacometti
6/6"; base back "Alexis Rudier"
84
5i
Nose(LeNez). 1947
Bronze, wire, rope, steel, 15 x 3 x 16"
(38 x7.5 x66 cm.)
Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: bottom "Alberto Giacometti
5/6 Susse Fondeur Paris"
85
52-
Man Walking Quickly under the Rain
(Homme qui marche sous la pluie).
1948
Bronze, 17% x 3o3/s x 57/s"
(45 *77* 15 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 4/6
Inscribed: plinth right side "4/6 A.
Giacometti"; base lower left side
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
86
53
Standing Woman (Femme debout).
1948
Bronze, 7i5/sx 8% x 14V4"
(182. x 23 x 36 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/5
Inscribed: base right side "A. Gia-
cometti 1/5"; base back left "Alexis
Rudier Fondeur Paris"
54
Standing Woman (Femme debout).
1948
Bronze, 66 x 6V4 x i33/s"
(167.5 x 16 x 34 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plinth side right "A.
Giacometti 1/6"; plinth back right
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
87
55
Three Men Walking (Trois hommes
quimarchent). 1948
Bronze, 283/s x i53/4 x i.y'k"
(72. x 40 x 40 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Howard
Sloan, New York
Cast no. 4/6
Inscribed: upper base front "A.
Giacometti 4/6"; lower base back
bottom "Alexis Rudier Paris"
88
56
City Square (Place). 1948
Bronze, 23 x 17V2 x 9V2"
(58.5 x44.5 x25 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: plinth "6/6 A. Giacometti";
corner "Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
57
Man Crossing a Square {Homme
traversant une place). 1949
Bronze, 26% x 31 V2 x 20V2"
(68 x 80 x 52. cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/5
Inscribed: base right "A Giacometti
1/5"; base right side "Alexis Rudier
Fondeur Paris"
59
Composition with Seven Figures and a
Head (The Forest) (Sept figures et une
tete (La Foret)). 1950
Painted bronze, 22" h. (h. 56 cm.)
Collection The Reader's Digest
Association, Pleasantville, New York
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base right side at left "A.
Giacometti 2/6"; base back right
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
90
58
Figure between Two Houses (Figurine
entre deux boites qui sont des maisons).
1950
Bronze, ii7/sxzix 33/i"
(30 x54 x9.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: right (narrow) side "A.
Giacometti 1/6"; back left"Susse
Fondeur Paris"
9i
6o
Chariot (Le Chariot). 1950
Bronze, 65% x x^Vs x 2.7V2"
(167 x 62 x 70 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: plate right side "3/6
A. Giacometti"
92
62
Four Figurines on a Base (Quatre
figurines sur base). 1950
Bronze, 6^7/s x 16V2 x i25/s"
(162 x 42 x 32 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plate edge right side "1/6
A. Giacometti"; plate edge back
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
61
Four Women on a Base (Quatre
femmes sur socle). 1950
Bronze, 30 x 16V& x 6Vi"
(76 x 41.5 x 17 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base top right side "1/6 A.
Giacometti"; base back left "Alexis
Rudier Fondeur Paris"
93
63
Square (Composition with Three
Figures and a Head) (Place (Composi-
tion avec trois figures et une tete)).
1950
Bronze, 22V4 x zi'/i x 16V2"
(56 x 56 x 42 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: plate edge right side "A.
Giacometti 2/6"; plate edge back left
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
94
64
Glade (La Clair iere). 1950
Bronze, 23V4 x 253/4 x 20V2"
(59.5 x65.5 x52 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plate edge right side "A.
Giacometti 2/6"; plate edge back
"Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris"
95
65
Cat (Le Chat). 195 1
Bronze, 11 V2 x 3i3/4 x 53/s"
(29 x 80.5 x 13.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 5/8
Inscribed: base front right "Alberto
Giacometti 5/8"; right side "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
66
Dog (Le Chi en). 195 1
Bronze, 17% x 385/s x 57/s"
(45 x 98 x 15 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/8
Inscribed: base underneath head
"Alberto Giacometti 1/8"
96
67
Standing Nude HI (Nu debout III).
1953
Bronze, 21 V2 x 43/i x 6V4"
(54.5 x izx 16.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base right side "1/6 1953
Alberto Giacometti"
68
Nude (Figure on a Cube) (Nu (Figurine
sur cube)). 1953
Bronze, zzV& x 5?/s x 5V2"
(57.5 x 15 x 14 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: base right side "Alberto
Giacometti 6/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
97
69
Diego in a Jacket (Diego au blouson).
1953
Bronze, 14 x 11 x 4V8"
(35.5 x 28 x 10.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: back left "1953 3/6 Alberto
Giacometti"; back right "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
98
70
Diego in a Sweater (Diego an chandail).
1954
Bronze, 19V4 x io5/8 x 8V4"
(49 x 27 x 21 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base right side "1/6 Alberto
Giacometti"; bottom base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
99
7i
Large Head of Diego (Grande tete de
Diego). 1954
Bronze, 25% x i53/s x 85/s
(65 x 39 x 2i cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 4/6
Inscribed: shoulder back right "Alberto
Giacometti 4/6"; shoulder back left
"Susse Fondeur Paris"
100
72-
Study after Nature (Etude d'apres
nature). 1954
Bronze, zi'/t xj'/sx 7V2"
(56.5 x 13 x 18.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base left "1954 Alberto
Giacometti 1/6"
73
Nude after Nature (Annette) (Nu
d'apres nature (Annette)). 1954
Bronze, zoVs x 5% x 7%"
(53 x 15 x 2.0 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: base left side "Alberto
Giacometti 3/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
74
Head of Diego (Tete de Diego). 1955
Bronze, 22V4 x 8V2 x 57/g"
(56.5 x 21.5 x 15 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: back left "1/6 Giacometti";
back right "Susse Fondeur Paris"
75
Seated Woman (Femme assise). 1956
Bronze, 30V4" h. (h. 77 cm.)
Collection Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base right side bottom
"Alberto Giacometti 1/6"; base back
left "Susse Fondeur Paris"
102
76
Woman of Venice I (Femtne de
Venise I). 1956
Bronze, 41V4" h. (h. 105 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Keith Barish,
New York
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: base back "Alberto
Giacometti 3/6 Susse Fondeur Paris"
77
Woman of Venice II (Femme de
Venise II). 1956
Painted bronze, 47V2" h. (h. 120.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: plinth left "1/6 Alberto
Giacometti"; plinth back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
y
rr~
103
78
Woman of Venice IV (Fetnme de
Venise IV). 1956
Bronze, 46" h. (h. 114. 5 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred P.
Cohen
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: base "Alberto Giacometti"
79
Woman of Venice VI (Femme de
Venise VI). 1956
Bronze, 52" h. (h. 132 cm.)
Lent by Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: base left side "Alberto
Giacometti"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
JL
m
I
[*■ G^n&'
%^fl
J 04
8o
Woman of Venice VII (Femme de
Venise VII). 1956
Bronze, 48" h. (h. 122 cm.)
Private Collection
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: base right side "Alberto
Giacometti 2/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur"
81
Woman of Venice VIII (Femme de
Ve?useVI!I).i956
Bronze, 48" h. (h. 122 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: base left side "Alberto
Giacometti 2/6"; base back right
"Susse Fondeur Paris"
105
83
Head of a Man on a Rod (Tete
d'homme sur tige). 1956-58
Bronze, i6V» x 4V8 x ^Vs"
(41.5 x 10.5 x 13 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/1
Inscribed: base left side bottom "A.
Giacometti 1/1"
82
Project for a Monument to a Famous
Man (Projet pour un monument d'un
homme celebre). 1956
Bronze, 18" h. (h. 46 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: base left "Giacometti 2/6";
plinth back "Susse Fondeur"
106
Head of a Man on a Rod (Tete
d'bomme sur tige). 1957
Plaster, 12 X4 x 4%" (31 x 10 x 11 cm.
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/1
Inscribed: base left side "A.
Giacometti 1/1"
85
Head of a Man on a Rod (Tete
d'homme sur tige). 1957
Bronze, izVi x 3V2 x 43/s"
(30.5 x 9 x 11 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Cast no. 1/1
Inscribed: base left side "A. Giacometti
1/1"
107
86
Seated Woman (Femme assise).
1956
Bronze, 21" h. (h. 53.5 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred P.
Cohen
Cast no. 7/8
Inscribed: base "Alberto Giacometti
7/8"
87
Leg (La Jatnbe). 1958
Bronze, 86 x 11 % x 18V4"
(218.5 x 30 x 46.5 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base left side "5/6 Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur"
108
Diego on Stele I (Diego sur stele 1.)
1957-58
Bronze, 63V2" h. (h. 161. 5 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: head back "Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur"
89
Diego on Stele 111 (Diego sur stele 111).
1957-58
Painted bronze, 65 Vs" h. (h. 166 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: stele top surface "3/6
Alberto Giacometti"; plinth back
"Susse Fondeur Paris"
109
90
Awkward Woman (Femme mastoc).
1958
Bronze, 2.5V2" h. (h. 65 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: plinth left "Alberto
Giacometti 3/6"; plinth back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
9i
Woman with a Broken Shoulder
(Femme, epaule cassee). 1958-59
Bronze, z57/s" h. (h. 65.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 1/2
Inscribed: plinth right "Alberto
Giacometti 1/2"; plinth back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
m
92.
Large Seated Woman (Grande femme
assise). 1958
Bronze, 32V2 x 8 x 12"
(82.5 x 20.5 x 30.5 cm.)
Collection The Milwaukee Art Center,
Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: base left side "Alberto
Giacometti 2/6"; base back "Susse
Fondr Paris"
in
93
Project for Chase Manhattan Plaza
(Projet pour Chase Manhattan Plaza).
1959
a. Cast no. 3/6, bronze, iVs" h.
(h. 5.3 cm.); with base, z7/» x 3V4 x V2"
(7.5 x 8 x 1.3 cm.)
Inscribed: base right side "Alberto
Giacometti"; base left side "Thinot
Fondeur 3/6"
b. Cast no. 5/6, bronze, 3" h.
(h. 7.5 cm.); with base, 4% x 1V2 x 1"
(10.5 X4XZ.5 cm.)
Inscribed: base back "Alberto
Giacometti"; base left side "Thinot
Fondeur"
c. Cast no. 5/6, bronze, V4" h.
(h. 2 cm.); with base, zVs x V2 x Vs"
(6 x 1.3 x 1 cm.)
Inscribed: base back "A. Giacometti";
base left side "Thinot Fondeur"
Private Collection
112
H3
94
Walking Man 1 (Homme qui marche I).
i960
Bronze, jiVa" h. (h. 182 cm.)
Collection Mrs. Bertram Smith
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: base back "Susse Fondeur
Paris"; left leg left side "Alberto
Giacometti"
114
95
Monumental Head (Grande tete). i960
Bronze, 37% " h. (h. 95 cm.)
Private Collection
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base "Alberto Giacometti
5/6"
115
96
Large Standing Woman I (Grande
femme debout I), i960
Bronze, 106V2" h. (h. 270 cm.)
Lent by Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base top left "Alberto
Giacometti 5/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur de Paris"
97
Large Standing Woman 11 (Grande
femme debout II). i960
Bronze, 109 V2" h. (h. 278 cm.)
Collection PepsiCo., Inc., Purchase,
New York
Cast no. 4/6
Inscribed: base right side "Alberto
Giacometti 4/6"; base back "Susse
Fondeur Paris"
116
98
Large Standing Woman HI (Grande
femme debout 111), i960
Bronze, 92%" h. (h. 236 cm.)
Collection PepsiCo., Inc., Purchase,
New York
Cast no. 4/6
Inscribed: base right side "4/6"; base
back "Susse Fondeur Paris"
99
Large Standing Woman IV (Grande
femme debout IV). i960
Bronze, 106V4" h. (h. 270 cm.)
Collection Sheldon H. Solow
Cast no. 5/6
/■: <
117
Bust of Caroline (Buste de Caroline).
1961
Bronze, i87/8" h. (h. 48 cm.)
Lent by Galerie Beyeler Basel
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: base back "1/6 Alberto
Giacometti"
118
IOI
Head of Diego (Tete de Diego). 1961
Bronze, io5/s" h. (h. 27 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: plinth back "6/6 Alberto
Giacometti"
119
Bust of Yanaihara (Buste de
Yanaihara). i960
Bronze, 17" h. (h. 43 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred P.
Cohen
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: back bottom "Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur Paris"
103
Bust of Annette IV (Buste d' Annette
IV). 1962
Bronze, 22V2" h. (h. 57 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Nathan
Cummings
Cast no. 6/6
Inscribed: edge lower right "Alberto
Giacometti 6/6 Susse Fondeur Paris"
104
Bust of Annette (Buste d' Annette).
c. i960
Painted bronze, 18" h. (h. 46 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 1/6
Inscribed: bust back bottom "Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur Paris"
105
Bust of Annette VI (Buste d' Annette
VI). 1962
Bronze, 23 Vs" h. (h. 60 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
Zimmerman
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base right side "Susse
Fondeur Paris"; base back "Alberto
Giacometti 5/6"
121
io6
Bust of Annette VII (Buste d' Annette
VII). 1962
Bronze, 23 V2" h. (h. 59.5 cm.)
Collection The San Francisco Museum
of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Louis
Honig
Cast no. 2/6
Inscribed: base top left "2/6 Alberto
Giacometti"
107
Bust of Annette VIII (Buste d' Annette
VIII). 1962
Bronze, 23" h. (h. 58.5 cm.)
Collection University of Arizona
Museum of Art, Gallagher Memorial
Collection
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: side lower left "Alberto
Giacometti 5/6"
122
io8
Bust of Annette IX (Buste d' Annette
IX). 1964
Bronze, 17% " h. (h. 45 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 3/6
Inscribed: bust bottom front "3/6
Alberto Giacometti Susse Fondeur
Paris"
109
Chiavenna Head 1 (Tete de
Chiavennal). 1964
Bronze, 16V4" h. (h. 41.5 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Cast no. 5/6
Inscribed: base right side "Alberto
Giacometti"; base back edge "Susse
Fondeur Paris"; base right edge "5/6'
12.3
Bust of a Man, New York 1 (Buste
d'homme, New York I). 1965
Bronze, 21 Vt" h. (h. 54 cm.)
Collection Annette Giacometti
Cast no. 8/8
Inscribed: base back "8/8 Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur Paris"
Elie Lotar (Elie Lotar). 1965
Bronze, 26%" h. (h. 67 cm.)
Collection Annette Giacometti
Cast no. 8/8
Inscribed: base back "8/8 Alberto
Giacometti Susse Fondeur Paris"
124
Paintings
112
Bruno with Hazel Pipe (Bruno avec
flute de noisette). 1920
Oil on canvas, 11 x 8V4" (28 x 21 cm.)
Private Collection
Not inscribed
125
H3
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1921
Oil on canvas, 32V2 x 28%"
(82.5 x 72 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti"
126
ii4
Portrait of the Artist's Father (Portrait
du pere de l' artiste). 1930-32
Oil on canvas, z$lA x 23 Vs"
(64 x 60 cm.)
Collection Kunsthaus Zurich
Not inscribed
i*7
H5
Apple (La Pomme). 1937
Oil on canvas, 28 V4 x 29 Vh"
(72 x75.3 cm.)
Private Collection
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1937"
128
n6
Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Portrait
de la mere de I' artiste). 1937
Oil on canvas, 23% x 19%"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Private Collection
Not inscribed
t I
1 29
H7
Seated Man (Homme assis). 1946
Oil on canvas, 32.V2 x z^Vs"
(82.5 x 64.5 cm.)
Collection Acquavella, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1946"
130
Yellow Chair in the Studio (La Chaise
jaune dans I' atelier). 1946
verso: Head of a Man (Tete d'homme).
Oil on masonite, 17% x i25/s"
(44 x 32 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Lust
Inscribed: recto lr "Alberto
Giacometti"; verso lr "Alberto
Giacometti 1946"
119
Giacometti at the Easel (Giacometti au
chevalet). 1946-47
Oil on canvas, 19V2 x 13"
(49-5 *33 cm.)
Collection Robert Elkon
Not inscribed
'
131
120
Tall Figure (Grand figure). 1947
Oil on canvas, 54V8 x i6Vs"
(138 x 41 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1947"
121
Head of a Man (Tete d'homme). 1947
Oil on canvas, zjVa x 15"
(69 x 38 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1947"
132
Three Plaster Heads (Trois tetes de
pldtre). 1947
Oil on canvas, 28% x 233/s"
(73 x 59.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1947"
*St,'s»w^JJf /<&
133
123
The Bathers (Les Baigneurs). 1949
Oil on canvas, 2.3 5/s x SlA"
(60 x 21 cm.)
Private Collection
Not inscribed
125
Annette (Annette). 195 1
Oil on canvas, 3i7/s x 25 V2"
(81 x 65 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Alberto Giacometti
1951"
/
■ «1 fc
?
fl*C*/'(^J|'iCp ffrtfj '/jfj
134
124
Seated Figure in Studio (Figure assis
dans I' atelier). 1950
Oil on canvas, 39V2 x 3i7/s"
(100.5 x 81 cm.)
Collection Julian J. Aberbach
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti"
135
126
Street (La Rue). 1952.
Oil on canvas, 283/4 x 21 lA"
(73 x 54 cm.)
Lent by Galerie Beyeler Basel
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1952"
.1 hU IV' I «" I
I : ?fi
136
127
Landscape (Paysage). 1952
Oil on canvas, 22 x 24%"
(56 x 61.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: Ir "Alberto Giacometti
1952"
137
Standing Nude (Nue debout). 1953
Oil on canvas, 6zV4 x 2.2."
(159.5 x 56 cm.)
Lent by Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1953"
129
Diego (Diego). 1953
Oil on canvas, 39V2 x jiVi"
(100.5 x 80.5 cm.)
Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Not inscribed
138
i3°
Portrait of Peter Watson (Portrait de
Peter Watson). 1954
Oil on canvas, 283/s x 23%"
(72 x 60 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1954"
, mi ii»--"
AU-v/sSi^r—"
139
i3i
Portrait of G. David Thompson (Por-
trait de G. David Thompson). 1957
Oil on canvas, 39% x 29 Vs"
(100 x 74 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
140
132
Portrait of haku Yanaihara (Portrait
d'lsaku Yanaihara). 1957
Oil on canvas, 31% x i^A"
(81 x 65.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
Ateat^ $ianBiii*[fi Lc:
141
133
Annette (Annette). 1957
Oil on canvas, 36V4 x 28 V2"
(92 x 72.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
142
134
Gray Figure (Figure grise). 1957
Oil on canvas, 25 x 21V4"
(63.5 x 54 cm.)
Lent by Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
135
Standing Nude (Nue debout). [958
Oil on canvas, 61V4 x 2.7V2"
(155.5 X70cm.)
Lent by Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr " 1958 Alberto
Giacometti"
\
«.
- *tt,* c , ~
143
i36
Man in a Landscape (Homme dans
unpaysage). 1958
Oil on canvas, z^Vs x 3i7/s"
(60 x 81 cm.)
Lent by Galerie Beyeler Basel
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1958"
v Ajjfr
T44
137
Portrait of Yanaihara (Portrait de
Yanaihara). 1961
Oil on canvas, 39 x 32" (99 x 81 cm.)
Collection Sheldon H. Solow
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1961"
^ ^
t
•
145
i38
Portrait of Caroline (Portrait
de Caroline). 1962
Oil on canvas, 51 x 38"
(129.5 x 96.5 cm.)
Collection The Art Institute of
Chicago, Mary and Leigh B. Block
Fund for Acquisitions in Memory
of Miss Loula Lasker
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1962"
I
.
J
AMvttt G/CUBIU&;
146
139
Annette in a Coat (Annette avec
manteau). 1964
Oil on canvas, 45 V2 x 3i3/4"
(115. 5 x 80.5 cm.)
The Kittay Collection
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1964"
147
140
Head of a Man I (Diego) (Tete
d'hommel (Diego)). 1964
Oil on canvas, i77/s x 1 3 3/i "
(45.5 X35cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
,-
141
Head of a Man II (Diego) (Tete
d'homme II (Diego)). 1964
Oil on canvas, ijVs x i43/i"
(45-5 x 37-5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
148
142
Portrait of Maurice Lefebvre-Foinet
(Portrait de Maurice Lefebvre-Foinet).
1964
Oil on canvas, 2i5/8 x iS'/s"
(55 X46cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
/\
149
143
Head of a Man III (Diego) (Tete
d'homme III (Diego)). 1964
Oil on canvas, 2.5 V2 x ij7/»"
(65 x 45.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
144
Head of a Man IV (Diego) (Tete
d'homme IV (Diego)). 1964
Oil on canvas, i95/s x 16"
(50 x 40.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
150
145
Portrait of Annette in a Yellow Blouse
(Portrait d' Annette a la blouse jaune).
1964
Oil on canvas, i95/8 x i53/4"
(50 x 40 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
146
Portrait of Nelda (Portrait de Nelda).
1964
Oil on canvas, 2i3/s x iSMj"
(54.5 X46CIT1.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
«% • \ *
151
147
Portrait of Annette (Portrait
d' Annette). 1964
Oil on canvas, zjVi x i95/8"
(70 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
152
Little Nude (Annette) (Petite nue
(Annette)). 1964
Oil on canvas, 235/s x 19V2"
(60 x 49.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
153
149
Figure and Head (Figure et tete). 1965
Oil on canvas, 35% x 283/s"
(90 x 72 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Not inscribed
154
Works on Paper
150
The Artist's Mother (La Mere de
l' artiste). 191 3-14
Pencil, 14^ x 9V2" (36.5 x 24.5 cm.
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1913-14"
9/i*&;
155
i5i
Self Portrait at the Age of Seventeen
(Autoportrait a dix-sept ans). 191 8
verso: Sketches of the Artist's Mother
and Sister in Stampa (Les Esquisses de
la mere et la soeur de I' artiste a Stampa)
Ink, i23/4 x 9" (32.5 x 23 cm.)
Collection Frank Perls, Beverly Hills,
California
Inscribed: recto lr "Alberto
Giacometti"; 11 "1918"
152
Portrait of Simon Berard (Portrait de
Simon Berard). 1919
Ink, 12V4 x 9V4" (31 x 23.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: bottom "Aus dieser
Zeichnung wirst Du besser die Stellung
verstehen, ich machte sie an einem
Sonntag Morgen. Tsching"
~n
3 i
X
156
154
Seated Woman (Femme assise).
1922-23
Pencil, 15V4 x n" (38.5 x 28 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: Ir "Alberto Giacometti
1922-23"
153
Still Life with Apples (Nature morte
avecpommes). 1920
Oil on paper, 12V4 X14" (31 X35.5 cm.)
Collection Lydia Thalmann-Amiet,
Oschwand BE, Switzerland
Inscribed: bottom center "Alberto"
M6»if«
/iff'
157
155
Standing Nude from the Back (Nue
debout,de dos). 1922-23
Pencil, i6Vs x io1//' (41 x 26 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1922-23"
156
Man Standing (Homme debout).
1922-23
Pencil, 14V2 x 7" (37 x 18 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1922-23"
158
157
Seated Nude from the Back (Nu
assis, de dos). 1922-23
Pencil, 19V8 x i23/s" (48.5 x 31.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "1922-23 Alberto
Giacometti"
158
Seated Woman from the Back (Femme
assise, de dos). 1922-23
Pencil, i83/8 x n7/8" (46.5 x 30cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lc "Alberto Giacometti
1922-23"
159
159
Three Nudes (Trois femmes nues).
1923-2.4
Pencil, 1JV2 x 11" (44.5 x 28 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: Ir "Alberto Giacometti
1923-24"
#Zr, T^,./.- • ^S'/^f £,
l60
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1923-24
Pencil, i^Vs x 12V4" (48.5 x 31.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
autoportrait 1923-24"
160
i6i
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1923-24
Pencil, io}/4 x 9" (27.5 x 23 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1923-24 autoportrait"
162
Study of Head and Shoulder
(Etude de tete et d'epaule).
1931
Pencil, 13 x 10" (33 x 25.5 cm.)
Collection Wilder Green, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1931"
a '1 *.,<•.,, ^„-. /•<
l6l
i63
Palace at 4 a.m. (Palais de quatre
heures). 1932.
Ink, 8V2 x io5/s" (21.6 x 27 cm.)
Collection Kunstmuseum Basel,
Kupferstichkabinett
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti"
J
164
My Studio (Dessin de mon atelier).
1932
Pencil, 12 x 18V2" (30.9 x 46.9 cm.)
Collection Kunstmuseum Basel,
Kupferstichkabinett
Inscribed: lr "dessin de mon atelier
que vous m'avez fait la grande joie de
ne pas le trouver detestable. Alberto
Giacometti 1932"
'
•
162
1 65
Studio (Atelier). 1932
Pencil, 12 x i65/s" (31.2 X42 cm.
Collection Kunstmuseum Basel,
Kupferstichkabinett
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1932"
. r
♦
163
x66
Project for Jean-Michel Frank (Projet
pour Jean-Michel Frank), c. 19 32
Gouache and pencil, 83/4 x 5V2"
(22 x 14 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: 11 "Giacometti projet
Pour JEAN-MICHEL FRANK"
167
Moon-Happening (Lunaire). c. 1933
Ink, 11 x 77/8" (28 x 20 cm.)
Collection Aime Maeght, Paris
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1933" [?]
164
i68
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1937
Pencil, 19V4 x iz'/s" (49 x 31.5 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1937"
169
Chair (La Chaise). 1940
Pencil, iz3/s x 9V4" (31.5 x 23.5 cm.)
Collection John Rewald, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1940"
rx\
A / /9S Z
165
I7°
Portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre (Portrait
de Jean-Paul Sartre). 1946
Pencil, u3/4 x SVs" (30 x 22.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: 11 "Jean-Paul Sartre.";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1946."
171
Portrait of Georges Bataille (Portrait
de Georges Bataille). 1947
Pencil, 6Vs x 5V4" (17 x 13.5 cm.)
Private Collection
Not inscribed
ihh
172
Head (Tete). 1947
Watercolor, 18% x 11 Vie"
(47.5 x 28 cm.)
Collection Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Gift of Graham Gund and Lois Orswell
Inscribed: lr "A. Giacometti 47."
173
Two Male Figures and Standing Nude
(Deux hommes et nue debout). c. 1948
Pencil, 17V2 x 11" (44.5 x 28 cm.)
Collection Dr. Eugene A. Solow
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti vers
1948."
M/**>~*
167
174
Men Walking in a Square (Hommes
qui marchent dans une place). 1949
verso: Untitled
Sepia and ink, iz3/4 x 19 V2"
(32.5x49.5 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Alexander
Liberman
Inscribed: recto lr "Alberto Giacometti
1949"
t68
175
Standing Woman in an Interior
(Femme debout dans un interieur).
1950
verso: Studio Interior (Atelier). 1950
Pencil, zoVfe x 14" (51 x 35.5 cm.)
Collection Wilder Green, New York
Not inscribed
176
Man with Hands Outstretched
(Homme avec mains etendus). 1950
Pencil, 19% x 12V2" (50.2 x 31.8 cm.
Collection John Rewald, New York
Inscribed: Ir "Alberto Giacometti"
169
177
Head (Tete). 195 1
verso: Head (Tete).
Crayon, 15V4 x 11" (38.5 x 28 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: recto lr "Alberto Giacometti
1951"
178
Figures in a City Street (Personnages
dans la rue). 1952
Lithograph crayon, 14 x ioW
(35.5x26.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1952"
I.
/ '■
170
179
Henri Matisse. 1954
Pencil, 19^ x izlA" (49 x 31 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Inscribed: 11 "5 VII 54"
180
Portrait of Douglas Cooper (Portrait
de Douglas Cooper). 1957
Pencil, 25% x 19V4" (65.5 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
171
i8i
Mountain (Le Montagne). 1957
Pencil, i93/4 x 253/i" (50 x 65.5 cm.
Collection The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
-
172
182
Portrait of Stravinsky (Portrait de
Stravinsky). 1957
Pencil, i6Vs x \z%" (41 x 31.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Incribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1957"
183
Apples (Les Pomtnes). 1959
Pencil, 19V2 x izVi" (49.5 x 32.5 cm.)
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Herbert
Matter, New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1959"
173
Sketch Page for Sculpture (Une page
d'esquisse pour les sculptures). 1959
Crayon, 14V4 x iol/i" (36 x 26.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1959"
185
Studio with Stele (Atelier avec stele).
i960
Chalk, i35/8 x 10V4" (35 x 26 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Not inscribed
!
■
£=;-==**=
174
i86
Four Figures and a Head (Quatres
figures et une tete). i960
Pencil, i93/4 x i^Vs" (50 x 35 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Not inscribed
187
Little Figure, Large Tree (Petite figure,
grand arbre). 1962
Chalk, i35/8 x 10%" (35 x 17 cm.)
Collection Bruno Giacometti
Not inscribed
■fc5£
L
i-s
Diego's Head Three Times (Tete de
Diego trois fois). 1962
Ball-point pen, 8V4 x 61A" (21 x 16 cm.)
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: bottom "Pour Pierre Matisse
a 18 (deja!) Janvier 1962 Alberto
Giacometti"
P s?
nix liWU- j ^
'-
176
Figure in Interior (Figure dans
interieur). 1963
Pencil, i95/8 x i23/4" (50 x 32.5 cm.
Lent by Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti
1963"
190
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1963
Pencil, i97/8 x 12%" (50.5 x 32.5 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
V"
3*
177
Hotel Room I (Chambre d'hotel I).
1963
Pencil, i95/s x 13" (50 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
192
Hotel Room II (Chambre d'hotel II).
1963
Pencil, i95/8 x 13" (50 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
>
*r
193
Hotel Room III (Chambre d'hotel III).
1963
Pencil, i95/8 x 13" (50 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
I
"5? — - -,
t
178
194
Hotel Room IV (Cbambre d' hotel IV).
1963
Pencil, i95/8 x 13" (50 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
195
Hotel Room V (Chambre d'hotel V).
1963
Pencil, i95/8 x 13" (50 x 33 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Not inscribed
179
I <■)(■>
Walking Man (Homme qui marche).
Undated
verso: Still Life (Nature morte).
Pencil, 2.5 Vs x 19 V4" (64 x 49 cm.)
Collection The Worcester Art
Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel
Catton Rich
Inscribed: recto lr "Alberto
Giacometti"
197
Walking Man (Homme qui marche).
Undated
Ball-point pen, 9 x 7%" (23 x 19.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
Inscribed: lr "Alberto Giacometti"
3
•
1
f
1
^^
40~c/Z *•
180
Graphics
198
Artist's Mother Seated (Mere de
I' artiste assise). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z$V» x i95/s"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
199
Artist's Mother Reading (Mere de
I' artiste lisant). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z^Vs x 19 Vs"
(65 x50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
200
Artist's Mother Reading (Mere de
I' artiste lisant). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z$Vs x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
'
*v
-y
JTA.Z .
182
Artist's Mother Seated I (Mere de
l' artiste assise 1). 196}
Lithograph, trial proof, z$Vs x lyVs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
202
Artist's Mother at the Window
(Stampa) (Mere de I' artiste a la fenetre
(Stampa)). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 255/s x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
t>
-
■
183
203
Interior at Stampa (Interieur a Stampa).
1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 255/s x -1.9W
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
204
Hanging Lamp (La Suspension). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, Z55/s x 19W
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
... . <.
■
184
205
Mother Reading (Mere lisant). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, Z55/s x -19V9,"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
2.06
Landscape with Trees (Stampa)
(Pay sage aux arbres (Stampa)). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 255/s x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
'*'""
'
[tfflb
= /£■
- t%
??,<**,. «m.
Aa..zy.., ■< „t.
185
207
Head of a Woman (Tete de femme).
1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 255/s x i^Vs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
208
Head of a Man (Tete d'homme). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, T.y'/z x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
I
,■ ■
... <
186
2.09
Head of a Man (Tete d'homme). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 25% x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
zio
Bust of a Man (Buste d'homme). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z^Vs x lyVs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
•
187
ZII
Self Portrait (Autoportrait). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z^Vs x i^Vs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
188
Head of a Young Man (Tete de jeune
homme). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 2.55/s x 19VS"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
2-13
In the Mirror (Dans le miroir). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z^Vs x lyVg"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
214
Disturbing Object I (Objet inquietant
I). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, 255/s x 19 Vs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
215
Disturbing Object II (Objet inquietant
II). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, z^Vs x i^Vs"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
lr "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
fa"wcS*iH*:
.:,^. • £.-,tet.
:
190
216
Standing Man and Sun (Homme de-
bout et soleil). 1963
Lithograph, trial proof, zsVs x i95/8"
(65 x 50 cm.)
Collection The Alberto Giacometti
Foundation
Inscribed: 11 "Epreuve d'essai";
Ir "Alberto Giacometti 1963"
191
2I7
Paris sans fin, Paris, Teriade, 1969
Paris without End
Portfolio of 150 lithographs and text
by Alberto Giacometti
16V4 x iz3/)" (42.5 x 32.5 cm.)
The Ratner Family Collection, Ft. Lee,
New Jersey
PARIS
SANS
FIN
4 '
.-',
urn m
■ . i i
.
!;■
. L
192
Selected Bibliography
i. By the artist
"Objets mobiles et muets, Le
Surrealisme au service de la revolution,
no. 3, Paris, December 1931, pp. 18-19.
Seven sketches and prose-poem
"Toutes choses"; Reprinted, London
Arts Council Gallery, Giacometti, June
4-July 9, 1955, p. 7. Exhibition
catalogue.
New version with abridged text as
double-page lithograph, XXe Steele,
new series, no. 3, Paris, June 1952.,
after p. 68; Reprinted, Carola
Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary
Sculpture, New York, Wittenborn,
1955, revised edition 1961, pp. 308-
309; Herbert Lust, Giacometti: The
Complete Graphics, New York,
Tudor, 1970, p. 14; James Lord,
"Giacometti: Dubuffet," Bulletin of
the Rhode Island School of Design,
vol. 56, no. 3, March 1970, p. 26.
"Poeme en 7 espaces," "Le Rideau
brun," "Charbon d'herbe," "Hier,
sables mouvants," Le Surrealisme au
service de la revolution, no. 5, Paris,
May 1933, pp. 15.44-45-
English translation by David Gas-
coyne, "Poem in Seven Spaces,"
Art in America, vol. 54, no. 1, New
York, January 1966, p. 87; English
translation "Yesterday, Moving
Sands," Lucy R. Lippard, Surrealists
on Art, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall,
1971, pp. 141-143.
"Palais de 4 heures," Minotaure, no.
3-4, Paris, December 1933, p. 46.
English translation by Ruth Vollmer
and Don Gifford, "1 + 1 = 3,"
Trans/ formation, vol. 1, no. 3, New
York, 1953, pp. 165-167; New York,
The Museum of Modern Art,
Alberto Giacometti, June 9-October
10, 1965, p. 44. Exhibition cata-
logue; New York, The Museum of
Modern Art, Dada, Surrealism and
Their Heritage, March 27-June 9,
1968, p. 195. Traveled to Los
Angeles County Museum of Art,
July 16-September 8, The Art
Institute of Chicago, October 19-
December 8, p. 195. Exhibition
catalogue. Text by William S. Rubin;
William S. Rubin, Dada and Sur-
realist Art, New York, Abrams,
1968, pp. 252, 254; Lucy R. Lippard,
Surrealists on Art, New Jersey,
Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 144-145.
"Un sculpteur vu par un sculpteur,"
Labyrinthe, no. 4, Geneva, January 19,
1945, p. 5. On Henri Laurens.
English translation "One Sculptor
Looks at Another," New York, The
Cultural Center, Laurens and
Braque, January 15-March 21, 1971,
pp. 13-14. Exhibition catalogue.
"A propos de Jacques Callot," Laby-
rinthe, no. 7, Geneva, April 15, 1945,
p. 3.
"Le Reve, le sphinx et la mort de T.,"
Labyrinthe, no. 22.-23, Geneva, De-
cember 15, 1946, pp. 12-13.
"[Premiere] Lettre a Pierre Matisse,"
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery,
Alberto Giacometti, January 19-
February 14, 1948, pp. 31-45. Exhibi-
tion catalogue. English translation by
Lionel Abel, pp. 29-30, 36, 42, 44.
New English translation, New York,
The Museum of Modern Art,
Alberto Giacometti, June 9 -October
10, 1965, pp. 14-28. Exhibition cata-
logue; Reprinted, Herschel B. Chipp,
Theories of Modern Art: A Source
Book by Artists and Critics, Los
Angeles, University of California
Press, 1968, third paperback edition
1971, pp. 598-601; Lucy R. Lippard,
Surrealists on Art, New Jersey,
Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 145-148.
[Deuxieme] Lettre a Pierre Matisse,"
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery,
Alberto Giacometti, November- De-
cember 12, 1950, pp. 8, 10, 12, 14, 16,
18, 20, 24. English translation pp. 3,
5-6, 9, 11,13, x5> J7- Fragments of
Giacometti's letter. Exhibition cata-
logue.
"Un Aveugle avance la main dans la
nuit," XXe Siecle, new series, no. 2,
Paris, January 1952, pp. 71-72.
"Gris, brun, noir . . .," Derriere le
miroir, no. 48-49, Paris, June 1952,
pp. 2-3, 6-7. On Georges Braque.
"Mai 1920," Verve, vol. VII, no. 27-28,
Paris, January 1953, pp. 33-34.
On Italy.
"Derain," Derriere le miroir, no. 94-95,
Paris, February 1957, pp. 7-8.
"Ma realite," XXe Siecle, new series,
no. 9, Paris, June 1957, p. 53. English
translation, New York, Pierre Matisse
Gallery, Alberto Giacometti, 1961.
Exhibition catalogue.
"Concerning the Human Image," New
York, The Museum of Modern Art,
New Images of Man, 1959, reprinted
1969, p. 68. Letter to Peter Selz.
Exhibition catalogue.
"Paris sans fin," Paris sans fin: ijo
lithographies originates, Paris, Teriade,
1969. Autobiographical texts of 1963-
64; fall 1965.
"Notes sur les copies," L'Ephemere,
no. 1, Paris, 1967, pp. 104-108.
Reprinted with English translation
by Barbara Luigia La Penta, Luigi
Carluccio, Alberto Giacometti: A
Sketchbook of Interpretative Draw-
ings, New York, Abrams, 1968, pp.
VII-XL.
"Tout cela n'est pas grand' chose,"
L'Ephemere, no. i, Paris, 1967, p. 102.
2. Conversations with the artist (in
English)
Jean Clay, "Giacometti's dialogue with
death," Realites, no. 161, Paris, April
1964, pp. 54-58, 76. English edition.
193
Emily Genauer, "The 'Involuntary'
Giacometti," New York Herald
Tribune, Magazine Section, June 13,
1965, p. 32.
Carlton Lake, "The Wisdom of
Giacometti," The Atlantic Monthly,
vol. 216, no. 3, Boston, September
1965, pp. 117-126.
Alexander Liberman, "Giacometti,"
Vogue, vol. 125, no. 1, New York,
January 1, 1955, pp. 146-151, 178-179-
James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait,
New York, Doubleday, 1965.
Pierre Schneider, "At the Louvre with
Giacometti," Encounter, vol. 26, no. 3,
New York, March 1966, pp. 34-39.
Reprinted, Pierre Schneider, Louvre
Dialogs, New York, Athenaeum,
i97i,pp. 191-208.
David Sylvester, "Interview with
Alberto Giacometti," London, BBC,
III Program, September 1964.
Excerpts, The Sunday Times, Maga-
zine Section, London, July 4, 1965,
pp. 19-25.
Alexander Watt, "Conversation with
Giacometti," Art in America, vol. 48,
no. 4, New York, i960, pp. 100-102.
3. Monographs
Ernst Beyeler, ed., Alberto Giacometti,
Beyeler, Basel, 1964. German, French,
English editions. Includes "[Premiere]
Lettre a Pierre Matisse," "Alberto Gia-
cometti en timbre-poste ou en
medaillon," by Michel Leiris, excerpts
from interview by Andre Parinaud,
"Pourquoi je suis sculpteur."
Andre du Bouchet, Alberto Giacometti,
dessins 1914-1965, Paris, Maeght,
1969.
Palma Bucarelli, Giacometti, Rome,
Editalia, 1962. In Italian, French, and
English.
Luigi Carluccio, Alberto Giacometti:
Le copie del passato, Turin, Botero,
1968.
English translation by Barbara
Luigia La Penta, Alberto Giacometti.
A Sketchbook of Interpretative
Drawings, New York, Abrams,
1968.
Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti,
Paris, Maeght, 1962.
English translation by John Ashbery,
Alberto Giacometti, Paris, Maeght,
1962.
Jean Genet, L' Atelier d' Alberto
Giacometti, Decine, Barbezat, 1958.
New edition with photographs by
Ernst Scheidegger, 1963; Excerpts in
English, Harper's Bazaar, no. 3003,
New York, February 1962, pp. 102-
103,153-155,178-179.
Giacometti, Milan, Fabbri, 1967.
/ Maestri del Colore, No. 55. Includes
texts by Henri Coulonges and Alberto
Martini.
French translation, Giacometti,
Paris, Hachette, 1967. Chefs-
d'oeuvre de I' art, Grands peintres,
No. S5-
Giacometti, Milan, Fabbri, 1969.
/ Maestri della Scultura, No. 131.
Includes texts by Mario Negri and
Antoine Terrasse.
French translation, Giacometti,
sculptures, Paris, Hachette, 1969.
Chefs-d'oeiwre de I' art, Grands
peintres, No. 131.
Douglas Hall, Alberto Giacometti,
London, Knowledge Publications,
1967. The Masters Series, no. 48.
Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti,
Stuttgart, Hatje, 1971.
English translation by John Gabriel,
Alberto Giacometti, New York,
Abrams, 1972, London, Thames and
Hudson, 1972; French translation by
H. -Ch. Tauxe and Eric Schaer,
Lausanne, Guilde du Livre et
Clairefontaine, 1971. Contains docu-
mentary biography and compre-
hensive bibliography.
Carlo Huber, Alberto Giacometti,
Zurich, Ex Libris, 1970.
French translation, Alberto Gia-
cometti, Lausanne, Rencontre, 1970.
Gotthard Jedlicka, Alberto Giacometti
als Zeichner, Olten, Biicherfreunde,
i960.
Jean Leymarie, Quarantacinque disegni
di Alberto Giacometti, Turin, Einaudi,
1963.
James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait,
New York, Doubleday, 1965.
James Lord, Alberto Giacometti:
Drawings, Greenwich, Connecticut,
New York Graphic Society, 1971.
Herbert C. Lust, Alberto Giacometti:
The Complete Graphics and Fifteen
Drawings, New York, Tudor, 1970.
Herbert Matter, Alberto Giacometti: A
Photographic Essay, Basel, Druck-und
Verlagsanstalt, 2 vols. In preparation.
Introduction by Mercedes Matter, text
by Isaku Yanaihara.
Franz Meyer, Alberto Giacometti: Eine
Kunst existentieller Wirklichkeit,
Frauenfeld-Stuttgart, Huber, 1968.
Raoul Moulin, Giacometti: Sculpture,
Paris, Hazan, 1964.
English translation by Bettina
Wadia, Giacometti: Sculpture,
London, Methuen, 1964; New York,
Tudor, 1964.
Willy Rotzler and Marianne von Adel-
mann, Alberto Giacometti, Bern, Hall-
wag, 1970. Orbis Pictus No. 55.
Ernst Scheidegger, ed., Alberto Gia-
cometti: Schriften, Zeichnungen,
Zurich, Arche, 1958. Includes most of
Giacometti's writings 1931-1952 in
French and German.
Giorgio Soavi, // mio Giacometti,
Milan, Scheiwiller, 1966.
Isaku Yanaihara, Aberto Giacometti,
Tokyo, Misusu, 1958.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Alberto Gia-
cometti Stiftung, Die Sammlung der
Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, 1971.
Catalogue by Bettina von Meyenburg-
Campbell and Dagmar Hnikova.
4. Critical essays and publications
with important reproductions
Jean-Christoph Ammann, "Das Prob-
lem des Raumes im Werk Alberto
Giacometti," Werk, vol. 53, no. 6,
Winterthur, June 1966, pp. 237-240
Renato Barilli, "La prospettiva di
Giacometti," Letteratura, no. 58-59,
Rome, 1962, pp. 13-23.
John Berger, "The Death of Alberto
Giacometti," New Society, London,
February 3, 1966, p. 23.
John Berger, "Alberto Giacometti,"
The Moment of Cubism and Other
Essays, New York, Pantheon Books,
1969, pp. 112-116.
John Berger, "Giacometti: 1901-1966,"
The Nation, vol. 184, no. 12, New
York, March 21, 1966, pp. 341-342.
Edith Boissonnas, "A propos d'Alberto
Giacometti," La Nouvelle Revue
Francaise, no. 150, Paris, June 1, 1965,
pp. 1127-1129.
194
Andre Breton, "Equation de l'objet
trouve," Documents 34, new series, no.
1, Brussels, June 1934, pp. 17-2.4, illus.
Reprinted, V Amour fou, Paris, Gal-
limard, 1937, pp. 40-57.
Palma Bucarelli, "Giacometti: O del
Prigioniero," L'Europa Letteraria, vol.
2,\no. 8, Rome, April 1961, pp. 205-
Robin Campbell, "Alberto Giacometti:
A Personal Reminiscence," Studio
International, vol. 171, no. 874, Lon-
don, February 1966, p. 47.
Andrew Causey, "Giacometti: Sculptor
with a Tormented Soul," The Illus-
trated London News, January 22, 1969,
pp. 27-29.
Jean Clair, "Giacometti le sauveur,"
La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, no. 202,
Paris, October 1, 1969, pp. 545-557.
Douglas Cooper, "Portrait of a Genius
but," The New York Review of Books,
September 16, 1965, pp. 10-14.
Arthur Drexler, "Giacometti: A
Change of Space," Interiors, vol. 109,
no. 3, New York, October 1949, pp.
102-107, illus.
Jacques Dupin, "Giacometti, sculpteur
et peintre," Cahiers d' 'Art, vol. 29,
no. 1, Paris, October 1954, pp. 41-54,
illus.
Gerald Eager, "The Missing and the
Mutilated Eye in Contemporary Art,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
vol. 20, no. 1, Detroit, Fall 1961, pp.
49-59, illus.
Albert E. Elsen, "Introduction," The
Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture
from Rodin to 1969, Baltimore, Mu-
seum of Art, December 2, 1969-Feb-
ruary 1, 1970. Exhibition catalogue.
Claude Esteban, "L'espace et la fievre,"
La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, vol. 15,
no. 169, Paris, January 1967, pp.
119-127.
Andrew Forge, "Giacometti," The
Listener, London, July 23, 1965, pp.
131-132.
Frank Getlein, "Giacometti and Sur-
realism," The New Republic, vol. 153,
no. 10, New York, September 4, 1965,
pp. 31-32.
"Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures et
dessins recents," Cahiers d' Art, vol.
20-21, Paris, 1945-1946, pp. 253-268,
illus. No text.
Carola Giedion-Welcker, "New Roads
in Modern Sculpture," Transition, no.
23, Paris, 1935, pp. 198-201. Trans-
lated by Eugene Jolas.
Paule-Marie Grand, "Today's Artists:
Giacometti," Portfolio and Art News
Annual, no. 3, New York, i960, pp.
64-79, 138-140, illus. Translated by
Richard Howard.
Clement Greenberg, "Giacometti,"
The Nation, vol. 166, no. 6, New York,
February 7, 1948, pp. 163-164.
Harper's Bazaar, vol. 82, no. 1, New
York, January 1948, pp. 110-113.
Photographs by Brassai and Patricia
Matisse.
Thomas B. Hess, "Spotlight on: Gia-
cometti," Art News, vol. 46, no. 12,
New York, February 1948, p. 31.
Thomas B. Hess, "Giacometti: The
Uses of Adversity," Art News, vol. 57,
no. 3, New York, May 1958, pp. 34-35,
67, illus.
Thomas B. Hess, "The Cultural-Gap
Blues," Art News, vol. 57, no. 9, New
York, January 1959, pp. 22-25, 61-62.
Thomas B. Hess, "Alberto Gia-
cometti," Art News, vol. 65, no. 1,
New York, March 1966, p. 35.
Reinhold Hohl, "Alberto Giacometti:
Kunst als die Wissenschaft des Sehens,"
Jahrbuch Die Ernte, vol. 42, Basel,
Reinhardt, 1966, pp. 134-150, illus.
Reinhold Hohl, "Alberto Giacometti:
Atelier im Jahr 1932," Dm, vol. 31, no.
363, Zurich, May 1971, pp. 352-356,
illus.
Hans Hollander, "Das Problem des
Alberto Giacometti," Wallraf-Richartz
Jahrbuch, vol. 33, Cologne, DuMont
Schauberg, 1971, pp. 259-284, illus.
Anatole Jakovski, 24 essais sur Arp . . .
Giacometti . . . etc., Paris, Orobitz,
1935-
English translation "Inscriptions
under Pictures," Axis, no. 1,
London, 1935, p. 17.
Gotthard Jedlicka, "Alberto Giaco-
mettis Bildniszeichnungen nach Henri
Matisse," Neue Ziircher Zeitung, July
28, 1957; "Alberto Giacometti: Zum
sechzigsten Geburtstag am 10.
Oktober 1961," Neue Ziircher Zeitung,
October 10, 1961; "Alberto Giaco-
metti: Fragmente aus Tagebuchem
1953-1964," Neue Ziircher Zeitung,
April 5, 1964; "Begegnung mit Alberto
Giacometti," Neue Ziircher Zeitung,
January 16, 1966. All articles reprinted,
Alberto Giacometti: Einige Aufsatze
von Professor Dr. Gotthard Jedlicka,
Zurich, Alberto Giacometti Stiftung,
1965.
Heinz Keller, "Ueber das Betrachten
der Plastiken Alberto Giacomettis,"
Werk, vol. 50, no. 4, Winterthur, April
1963, pp. 161-164, illus. Contains
English summary.
Max Kozloff, "Giacometti," The
Nation, New York, vol. 200, no. 26,
June 28, 1965, pp. 710-711.
Max Kozloff, "Giacometti," Render-
ings: Critical Essays on a Century of
Modern Art, New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1968, pp. 182-187.
Hilton Kramer, "Reappraisals: Giaco-
metti," Arts Magazine, vol. 38, no. 2,
New York, November 1963, pp. 52-59;
Reprinted, The Age of the Avant-
Garde: Art Chronicle of 1956-1972,
New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
1973-
Hilton Kramer, "Alberto Giacometti,"
The New York Times, January 13,
1966, pp. 22, 24.
Jerrold Lanes, "Alberto Giacometti,"
Arts Yearbook 3, New York, 1959, pp.
152-155.
Michel Leiris, "Alberto Giacometti,"
Documents, no. 4, September 1929, pp.
209-214, illus. Contains English sum-
mary.
Michel Leiris, "Pierres pour un Alberto
Giacometti," Derriere le miroir, no.
39-40, Paris, Maeght, June 1951.
English translation of earlier version
of text by Douglas Cooper,
"Thoughts around Alberto Gia-
cometti," Horizon, vol. 19, no. 114,
New York, June 5, 1949, pp. 411-
417.
Georges Limbour, "Giacometti," Mag-
azine of Art, vol. 41, no. 7, New York,
November 1948, pp. 253-255, illus.
James Lord, "Alberto Giacometti,
sculpteur et peintre," L'Oeil, no. 1,
Paris, January 15, 1955, pp. 14-20,
illus.
English translation, "Alberto Gia-
cometti, Sculptor and Painter," The
Selective Eye: An Anthology of the
Best from L'Oeil, New York, Ran-
dom House, 1955, pp. 90-97, illus.
195
James Lord, "In Memoriam Alberto
Giacometti," L'Oeil, no. 135, Paris,
March 1966, pp. 42-46, 67, illus.
Nicola G. Markoff, "Alberto Giaco-
metti und seine Krankheit," Biindner
Jahrbucb, new series, no. 9, Chur,
Switzerland, 1967, pp. 65-68.
M. L. d'Otrange Mastai, "Micromegas
in our Midst," Apollo, vol. 75, no. 442,
London, December 1961, pp. 195-196,
illus.
M. L. d'Otrange Mastai, "Giacometti
Studies," The Connoisseur, vol. 158,
no. 638, London, April 1965, p. 279.
Mercedes Matter, "Giacometti: In the
Vicinity of the Impossible," Art
News, vol. 64, no. 4, New York, Sum-
mer 1965, pp. 27-29, 53-54, illus.
James R. Mellow, "Extraordinarily
Good, Extraordinarily Limited," The
New York Times, Sunday, November
2, 1969, p. 29.
Mario Negri, "Frammenti per Alberto
Giacometti," Domus, no. 320, Milan,
July 1956, pp. 40-48, illus.
Jiri Padrta, "Prostor v dile Giaco-
metta," Vytv. Umeni, vol. 13, Prague,
1963, pp. 157-165. ["Space in Giaco-
metti's Work"]
Roland Penrose, "Alberto Giaco-
metti," Institute of Contemporary
Arts Bulletin, no. 155, London, Febru-
ary 1966, p. 4.
Stuart Preston, "Giacometti," The
New York Times, December 15, 1950,
p. X25.
Maurice Raynal, "Dieu-table-cuvette.
Les ateliers de Brancusi, Despiau, Gia-
cometti," Minotaure, no. 3-4, Paris,
December 1933, p. 47. Photographs.
Gerard Regnier, "Orangerie des Tuil-
eries, Alberto Giacometti," La Revue
du Louvre, no. 4-5, Paris, October
1969, pp. 287-294.
Bryan Robertson, "The Triumph of
Time," The Spectator, no. 7153, Lon-
don, Friday, July 30, 1965, pp. 150-
151.
Jean-Paul Sartre, "La Recherche de
1'absolu," Les Temps Modernes, vol. 3,
no. 28, Paris, January 1948, pp. 1153-
1163.
Reprinted Situations III, Paris,
Gallimard, 1949, pp. 289-305;
English translation "The Search for
the Absolute," by Lionel Abel, New
York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Al-
berto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paint-
ings, Drawings, 1948, pp. 2-22; new
translation "The Search for the
Absolute," by Frederick T. Davis,
Harvard Art Review, no. 1, Cam-
bridge, 1966, pp. 28-30.
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Les peintures de
Giacometti," Derriere le miroir, no. 65,
Paris, Maeght, 1954.
Reprinted, Situations IV, Paris, Gal-
limard, 1964, pp. 346-347; English
translation by Lionel Abel, "Gia-
cometti in Search of Space," Art
News, vol. 54, no. 5, New York,
September 1955, pp. 26-29, 63-65;
English translation by Warren Ram-
say, "The Painting of Giacometti,"
Art and Artist, Berkeley and Los
Angeles; The University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1956, pp. 179-194;
English translation by Benita Eisler,
"Jean-Paul Sartre," Situations, New
York, Braziller, 1965.
Pierre Schneider, "Giacometti: His
men look like survivors of a ship-
wreck," The New York Times Maga-
zine, June 6, 1965, pp. 34-35, 37, 39,
42,44-46.
Michel Seuphor, "Giacometti and
Sartre," Art Digest, vol. 29, no. 1, New
York, 1954, p. 14.
Robert Smithson, "Quasi-Infinities and
the Waning of Space," Arts, vol. 41,
no. 1, New York, November 1966,
p. 30.
James Thrall Soby, "Alberto Giaco-
metti," The Saturday Review of Liter-
ature, vol. 38, no. 32, New York,
August 6, 1955, pp. 36-37.
James Thrall Soby, "Alberto Giaco-
metti, Modern Art and the New Past,
Norman, Oklahoma, University of
Oklahoma Press, 1957, pp. 122-126.
David Sylvester, "Perpetuating the
Transient," London, The Arts Council
of Great Britain, Alberto Giacometti,
June 4-July 9, 1955, PP- 3"6. Exhibi-
tion catalogue.
David Sylvester, "Post-Picasso Paris,"
The New Statesmen and Nation,
London, 1957, p. 838.
David Sylvester, "The Residue of a
Vision," London, The Tate Gallery,
Alberto Giacometti, 1965, pp. 19-27.
Exhibition catalogue.
David Sylvester, "Giacometti: An In-
ability to Tinker," The Sunday Times
Magazine, London, July 4, 1965, pp.
19-25, illus.
C. H. Waddington, Behind Appear-
ance, Edinburgh, University Press,
1969, pp. 228-234.
Alexander Watt, "Alberto Giacometti:
Pursuit of the Unapproachable," The
Studio, vol. 167, no. 849, London,
January 1964, pp. 20-27, illus. Includes
"Photo-finish" by Marianne von
Adelmann.
Herta Wescher, "Giacometti: A Pro-
file," Art Digest, vol. 28, no. 5, New
York, December 1, 1953, pp. 17,
28-29, illus.
Isaku Yanaihara, "Alberto Giacometti:
Pages de journal," Derriere le miroir,
no. 127, Paris, Maeght, May 1961,
pp. 18-26.
Christian Zervos, "Notes sur la sculp-
ture contemporaine: A propos de la
recente exposition internationale de
sculpture, Galerie Georges Bernheim,
Paris," Cahiers d 'Art, vol. 4, no. 10,
Paris, 1929, pp. 465-473, illus.
Christian Zervos, "Quelques notes sur
les sculptures de Giacometti," Cahiers
d' Art, vol. 7, no. 8-10, Paris, 1932, pp.
337-342. Contains seven photographs
by Man Ray.
5. Films
Sumner J. Glimcher, Stuart Chasmar
and Arnold Jamson, Alberto Giaco-
metti, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1966 and The Museum of
Modern Art. Color film, 16 mm.
12 min.
Jean-Marie Drot, Alberto Giacometti,
Paris, ORTF, November 19, 1963;
revised version, Paris, ORTF, 1966.
Television film series "Les heures
chaudes de Montparnasse." 35 mm.,
46 min.
Ernst Scheidegger, Peter Miinger and
Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti,
Zurich, Scheidegger and Rialto, 1966.
Color film, 16 and 35 mm., 29 min.
Giorgio Soavi, // sogno di una testa.
Ritratto di Alberto Giacometti, Lu-
gano, Televisione Svizzera Italiana,
1966. Black and white film, 16 mm.,
29 min.
196
Selected Exhibitions
Croup Exhibitions 1925-1952
Group exhibitions from this period
only are listed as Giacometti's inclu-
sion in them during these years was
extremely significant. Moreover, his
participation in such shows after 1952
was too extensive to list.
Salon des Tuileries, salle des cubistes,
Paris, May 1925.
Salon des Tuileries, Paris, November
I92-5-
Exposition des artistes suisses, Paris,
192.5-
Salon des Tuileries, Paris, 1926.
Salon des Tuileries, Paris, 1927.
Galerie Aktuaryus, Zurich, October
23-November 30, 1927, Giovanni und
Alberto Giacometti.
Salon des Tuileries, Paris, 1928.
Salon de L'Escalier, Paris, February
1928, Artisti Italiani di Parigi.
Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, 1928.
Galerie Zak, Paris, March-April 1929,
Un groupe d'ltaliens de Paris.
Galerie Georges Bernheim, Paris,
November 1929, Exposition interna-
tional de la sculpture.
Galerie Wolfensberg, Zurich, Novem-
ber-December 1929, Production Paris
1919.
Galerie Pierre, Paris, 1930, Miro, Arp,
Giacometti.
Galerie Pierre, Paris, May 22-June 6,
1931, Ou allons-nous?
Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, October-
November 193 1, Jeunes artistes
d'aujourd'hui.
Maison de la Culture, Paris, 1932.
Galerie Pierre Colle, Paris, June 7-18,
1933, Exposition surrealiste.
Salon des Surindependants, Paris,
1933.
Salon des Surindependants, Paris,
1934-
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, May
12-June 3, 1934, Exposition Mino-
taure.
Kunsthaus Zurich, October n-No-
vember 4, 1934, Was ist Surrealismusl
Copenhagen - Oslo, January 1935,
Exposition cubiste-surrealiste.
Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, February 24-
March 31, 1935, These - Antithese -
Synthese.
Santa Cruz de Teneriffa, May n-21,
1935, Esposicion Surrealista.
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, March 4-April 12, 1936, Cubism
and Abstract Art.
Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, May 22-
29, 1936, Exposition surrealiste
d'objets.
The New Burlington Galleries, Lon-
don, June 4-July 4, 1936, The Interna-
tional Surrealist Exhibition.
Kunsthaus Zurich, June 13-July 22,
1936, Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer
Malerei und Plastik.
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, December 7, 1936-January 17,
1937, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.
Tokyo, 1937, Surrealist Exhibition.
Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, January-
February 1938, Exposition internatio-
nal du surrealisme.
Zurich, May-October 1939, Schweize-
rische Landessaustellung.
M.A.J. Gallery, Paris, 1940, Art of
Our Time.
Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico
City, February 1940, Exposicibn Inter-
nacional de Surrealismo.
Art of this Century, New York,
October 1942.
197
Reid Mansion, New York, October
19-November 7, 1942, Surrealist Ex-
hibition.
Palais des Papes, Avignon, June 27-
September 30, 1947, Exposition de
peintures et sculptures contemporaries.
Kunsthalle, Bern, February-May 1948,
Sculpteurs contemporains de I'Ecole
de Paris.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1948,
13 Beeldbouwers uit Paris.
The Biennale, Venice, June-October
1948, XXIV Esposizione Internazio-
nale d 'Arte.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice,
September-October 1949, Mostra di
scultura contemporanea.
Maison de la Pensee Francaise, Paris,
Summer 1949, Sculpture de Rodin a
nos jours.
The Royal Academy of Art, London,
195 1, L'Ecole de Paris 1900-1950.
Battersea, London, 195 1, Second Open
Air Exhibition of Sculpture.
Kunsthalle, Basel, August 30-October
5, 195 2, Phantastiscbe Kunst des XX
Jahrbunderts.
Kunsthaus Zurich, 1952, Malerei in
Paris - heute.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London, July 1952, Recent Trends in
Realistic Painting.
One- Man Exhibitions
Galerie Pierre Colle, Paris, May 1932.
Julien Levy Gallery, New York, Dec-
ember 1, 1934, Abstract Sculpture by
Alberto Giacometti.
Art of this Century, New York, Feb-
ruary-March 1945, Sculptures 1931-
1935-
Galerie Pierre Loeb, Paris, 1946, Paint-
ings and Drawings 1945-1946.
Galerie Arts, Paris, 1947, Sculptures
1946-1947.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York,
January 19-February 14, 1948, Exhibi-
tion of Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings.
Catalogue with introduction by Jean-
Paul Sartre, autobiographical text with
sketches by Giacometti.
Kunsthalle, Basel, May 6-June 11,
1950, Andre Masson, Alberto Giaco-
metti.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York,
November 1950, Sculptures, Paintings,
Drawings. Catalogue with notes and
sketches by Giacometti.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, June-July 1951.
Catalogue with introduction by Michel
Leiris.
Wittenborn Gallery, New York, Sep-
tember 1952, Alberto Giacometti:
Lithograph Drawings of His Studio.
The Arts Club, Chicago, November-
December 1953.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, May 1954. Cat-
alogue with introduction by Jean-Paul
Sartre.
The Arts Council Gallery, London,
June4-July 9, 1955.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Mu-
seum, New York, June 7-July 17, 1955.
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld,
Germany, May-June 1955. Traveled
to Kiinstverein fur die Rheinlande und
Westfalen, Diisseldorf, July-August;
Wurtembergische Kiinstverein, Stutt-
gart, September 13-October 5.
Kunsthalle, Bern, June 16-July 22,
1956. Catalogue with introduction by
Franz Meyer.
The Biennale, Venice, June 19-October
1956, XXV III Esposizione Internazio-
nale d 'Arte.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, June 1957, Cat-
alogue with introduction by Jean
Genet.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York,
May 6-31, 1958, Sculptures, Paintings,
Drawings from 1956-1958.
Galerie Klipstein 8c Kornfeld, Bern,
July 18-August 22, 1959, Alberto
Giacometti: Zeichnungen undGraphik.
The World House Galleries, New
York, January-February i960.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, May 1961. Cat-
alogue with texts by Olivier Larronde
and Isaku Yanaihara.
Galleria Galatea, Torino, December
1-24, 1961. Catalogue with introduc-
tion by Luigi Carluccio.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York,
December 12-30, 1961.
The Biennale, Venice, June 16-October
7, 1962, XXXI Esposizione Interna-
zionale d 'Arte.
Kunsthaus Zurich, December 2-Jan-
uary 6, 1963. Catalogue with introduc-
tion by Eduard Hiittinger.
The Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C., February 2-March 4, 1963.
Galerie Krugier, Geneva, May-July
1963.
Galerie Beyeler, Basel, July-September
1963.
Libreria Einaude, Rome, December
1963.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York,
November 17-December 12, 1964,
Drawings. Catalogue with introduc-
tion by James Lord.
Kunstkabinett, Berlin-Weissensee, Ger-
many, 1964, Drawings.
Tate Gallery, London, July 17-August
30, 1965, Alberto Giacometti: Sculp-
tures, Paintings, Drawings 1913-1965.
Catalogue with introduction by David
Sylvester.
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, June 9-October 10, 1965, Sculp-
ture, Paintings and Drawings. Traveled
to The Art Institute of Chicago, No-
vember 5-December 12; Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, January n-
February 20, 1966; San Francisco Mu-
seum of Art, March 10-April 24, 1966.
Catalogue with introduction by Peter
Selz.
Louisiana Museum, Humblebaek,
Denmark, September 18-October 24,
1965.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, No-
vember 5-December 4, 1965, Alberto
Giacometti: Tekeningen.
Kunsthalle, Basel, June 25-August 28,
1966, Gedachtnis - Ausstellung Al-
berto Giacometti. Catalogue with in-
troduction by Franz Meyer.
Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, Octo-
ber 6-November 6, 1966, Alberto Gia-
cometti Zeichnungen. Catalogue with
introduction by Wieland Schmied.
Loeb & Krugier Gallery, New York,
December 1-31, 1966, Alberto Giaco-
metti and Balthus Drawings. Catalogue
with introduction by James Lord.
198
Galerie Engelberts, Geneva, March 10-
April 1967, Alberto Giacometti: Des-
sins, estampes, livres illustres,
sculptures. Catalogue with references
for catalogue raisonne.
Brook Street Gallery, London, 1967.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, No-
vember 6-30, 1968, Paintings and
Sculpture by Giacometti and Dubuffet.
Catalogue.
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, April
17-May 1969, Dessins d' Alberto
Giacometti. Catalogue with text by
Andre du Bouchet.
Musee National de TOrangerie des
Tuileries, Paris, October Z4-January
iz, 1970. Catalogue with introduction
by Jean Leymarie.
Rhode Island School of Design, Prov-
idence, 1970, Giacometti. Dubuffet.
Catalogue with introduction by James
Lord.
The Milwaukee Art Center, 1970,
Giacometti: The Complete Graphics
and ij Drawings. Traveled to
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo;
The High Museum of Art, Atlanta;
The Finch College Museum of Art;
The Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; The
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The
San Francisco Museum of Art. Book
with introduction by John Lloyd
Taylor, text and catalogue raisonne by
Herbert C. Lust.
Galerie Engleberts, Geneva, October
15-December 1 z, 1970, Alberto Giaco-
metti: Dessins, estampes, livres.
Frank Perls Gallery, Beverly Hills,
California, November z-December Z3,
1970. 36 lithographs and other works
by Alberto Giacometti.
Academie de France, Villa Medici,
Rome, October Z4-December 18, 1970.
Musee Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland,
July n-September zo, 1971, Sculpture
Suisse contemporaine. Catalogue.
Kunstmuseum, Olten, Switzerland,
January 197Z, Alberto Giacometti.
Paris sans fin. Catalogue with intro-
duction by Reinhold Hohl.
Galerie Gerald Cramer, Geneva,
March 10-May zo, 197Z, Alberto Gia-
cometti. Paris sans fin - livres et gra-
vures.
Galerie Scheidegger & Maurer, Zurich,
April-May 197Z, Alberto Giacometti.
Paris sans fin. Catalogue with intro-
duction by Reinhold Hohl.
Museo Civico di Belle Arti, Lugano,
April 7-June 17, 1973, La Svizzera
italiana onora Alberto Giacometti.
Tokyo, Galerie Seibu, September 1-18,
1973, Alberto Giacometti exposition
au japon. Traveled to Museum of
Modern Art, Hyogo, Kobe, October
zo-November Z5; Ishikawa Prefectural
Art Museum, December z-January 15,
1974. Catalogue with introduction by
Isaku Yanaihara; biographical chro-
nology by Reinhold Hohl.
199
Chronology
1901
Born October 10 in Borgonovo, Gris-
ons, Switzerland in Italian-speaking
Bergell valley, into a family of artists:
Giovanni Giacometti was his father,
Cuno Amiet his godfather and Augusto
Giacometti his mother's and father's
1906
Moved with family to Stampa, a few
miles south of Borgonovo.
1915-19
Attended secondary school in Schiers;
left before final examinations to work
in father's studio.
1919-20
Enrolled in Academy of Fine Arts,
Geneva, attended painting classes of
David Estoppey; studied sculpture
and drawing at School of Arts and
Crafts, Geneva with Maurice Sarkissoff,
a former associate of Archipenko.
1920
Trip to Italy; saw Cezannes and Archi-
penkos at Venice Biennale, deeply im-
pressed by primitive and Egyptian art,
Tintorettos and Giottos he saw during
his travels.
1921
Spent about six months in Rome,
studying by himself and sketching in
museums after early Christian, early
Renaissance and Baroque art.
1922
Arrived in Paris January 1. Until 1924
returned every few months to Stampa.
For five years intermittently attended
Bourdelle's sculpture class at Academie
de la Grande Chaumiere.
1925-26
First participation in Salon des Tuile-
ries where he showed sculpture. Gave
up painting in Paris for nearly 20 years,
but continued to paint in Stampa.
192.7
Moved into small studio at 46, rue
Hippolyte-Maindron, with his brother
Diego, where he was to live and work
until his death. Participated in group
exhibitions in Paris with Italian
painter-friends; visited Laurens; saw
Surrealist painting, works by
Duchamp-Villon, African, Oceanic,
Cycladic and Sumerian sculpture.
1928
Sculpture shown at Galerie Jeanne
Bucher attracted much attention.
1929
Became friendly with Masson, Leiris,
Miro, Ernst and many other writers
and artists associated with Surrealism.
Participated in sculpture exhibition at
Galerie Bernheim, Paris; received crit-
ical acclaim. Contract with Pierre
Loeb.
1930-31
Miro-Arp-Giacometti exhibition at
Pierre Loeb led to his acceptance as a
central figure in Breton's Surrealist
circle; participated in its activities with
irregular loyalty. Assisted by Diego
made furniture for Jean-Michel Frank
for a number of years.
1932-33
First one-man exhibition Pierre Colle
Gallery, May 1932. Began to work
from the model, broke with Surrealist
group.
1934
First one-man exhibition in New York,
Julien Levy Gallery.
200
1939-41
Associated with Picasso, Sartre, de
Beauvoir.
1 94^-45
Left Paris on the last day of 1 94 1 ;
spent remaining War years in Geneva,
living and working in hotel room at
rue de la Terrassiere. Member of circle
of Albert Skira, publisher of Minotaure
and Labyrinthe, to which he contrib-
uted articles. Met Annette Arm.
1955
Major retrospectives at The Arts
Council of Great Britain, London; The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York; growing interest of private
collectors, particularly in English-
speaking countries.
1958
Received Guggenheim International
Award, Swiss National Section.
1946
Returned to Paris.
1947
Encouraged by Pierre Loeb made first
etchings since 1935.
1948
First one-man exhibition in 14 years
held at Pierre Matisse Gallery, New
York; Sartre's interpretation of his
figure style reprinted in this exhibi-
tion's catalogue influential in identifi-
cation of his work as Existential.
1949
Married Annette Arm.
Second exhibition at Pierre Matisse
Gallery; though invited to participate
in Venice Biennale, withdrew his work
from it; first post-War European retro-
spective at Kunsthalle Basel. First
acquisition by a public collection by
Kunstmuseum Basel through Emanuel
Hofmann-Funds.
1951
First lithographs made at urging of
Edouard Loeb. Exclusive European
contract with Maeght, who subse-
quently organized numerous sculpture
and painting exhibitions; regular
sculpture and drawing exhibitions at
Pierre Matisse in New York start. Be-
ginning of association with Samuel
Beckett around this time.
1959-60
Undertaking of Chase Manhattan
Plaza project; abandoned in summer
of i960.
1961
Awarded Pittsburgh International
Sculpture Prize.
1961
Venice Biennale Sculpture Prize.
1965
Received Grand Prize for Art of the
City of Paris; honorary Doctor's De-
gree, University of Bern. Major retro-
spectives at Tate Gallery, London;
Louisiana Museum, Humblebaek, Den-
mark; The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, all of which Giacometti
visited. Inspected Chase Manhattan
Plaza site in New York. Establishment
of The Alberto Giacometti Foundation
in Zurich, with works drawn from
gifts from the collection of G. David
Thompson, purchased with private
funds, and gifts from the artist, for
exhibition at the museums of Basel,
Winterthur and Zurich. Giacometti left
Paris December 5.
1966
Died January 11 at Cantonal Hospi-
tal, Chur.
Photographic Credits
BLACK AND WHITES
Courtesy Acquavella Galleries,
New York: Cat. no. 117
Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago:
Cat. nos. 36, 108, 138, 173
Kurt Blum: Fig. no. 7
Geoffrey Clements: Cat. no. 99
Geoffrey Clements, Courtesy Sidney
Janis Gallery, New York: Cat. nos.
50, 128, 134, 135
Courtesy Cliche des Musees
Nationaux: Cat. no. 27
Bevan Davies, New York: Cat. no. 119
Walter Drayer, Zurich, Copyright
ADAGP/Paris + Cosmopress/
Geneve: Cat. nos. 1-4, 6, 7, 9, 12,
14-19, 22, 28, 34, 35, 46, 47, 49, 52-54,
57, 58, 61, 62, 64-69, 71-74, 81, 83-85,
125, 130-132, 140-146, 148-150,
154-161, 179, 185, 186, 190-195,
198-215
Courtesy William N. Eisendrath, Jr.:
Cat. no. 48
Courtesy Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Cat. no. 172
Courtesy Galerie Beyeler Basel:
Cat. nos. 33, 87, 100, 126, 136
Photo Claude Gaspari, Paris, Courtesy
Galerie Maeght, Paris: Cat. no. 167
Hatje Publishers Stuttgart: Cat. no.
153
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.: Cat. no. 75
Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery:
Cat. no. 96
Courtesy Kupferstichkabinett der
Oeffentlichen Kunstammlung Basel
Hausaufnahme: Cat. no. 163
Courtesy Albert Loeb and Krugier
Gallery, New York: Cat. no. 169
Robert E. Mates, New York: Cat.
nos. 24, 29, 37, 51, 129, 174, 180,
181, 196
Robert E. Mates and Susan Lazarus,
New York: Cat. nos. 5, 20, 77, 114,
118, 152, 166, 170, 178, 197, 217
Courtesy Pierre Matisse Gallery, New
York: Cat. nos. 39, 76, 78-80, 88, 94,
109, 171
Herbert Matter: Frontispiece, cat. nos.
11, 21, 38, 56, 82, 89-91, no, III,
121,133,177,182-184
George H. Meyer, New York: Cat.
nos. 86, 102
Courtesy Milwaukee Art Center: Cat.
no. 92
Courtesy Musees Nationaux de
France: Cat. no. 30
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston: Cat. no. 32
Courtesy The Museum of Modern
Art, New York: Cat. nos. 40-45, fig. 2
Courtesy Nationalmuseum Stockholm:
Cat. no. 23
Courtesy Oeffentliche Kunstammlung
Basel: Fig. 5
Courtesy PepsiCo., Inc., Purchase,
New York: Cat. nos. 97, 98
Courtesy Frank Perls, Beverly Hills,
California: Cat. no. 151
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Photo-
graph by A. J. Wyatt, Staff Photog-
rapher: Cat. no. 10
Eric Pollitzer: Cat. nos. 40, 55, 93,
103-105, 120, 123, 139, 168, 188, 189
Nathan Rabin: Cat. nos. 162, 175, 176
Courtesy The Reader's Digest Associa-
tion, Pleasantville, New York: Cat.
no. 59
Courtesy The San Francisco Museum
of Art: Cat. no. 106
Ernst Scheidegger, Zurich: Fig. no. 3,
cat. no. 26
Courtesy Sheldon H. Solow: Cat.
no. 137
Eileen Tweedy, London: Cat. no. 25
Courtesy The University of Arizona
Museum of Art: Cat. no. 107
Foto Vasari Spa, Rome: Cat. nos.
164, 165
Marc Vaux, Paris: Fig. no. 1
EKTACHROMES
Foto Adelmann: Cat. no. 113
Courtesy Giacometti Foundation: Cat.
nos. 8, 13, 31, 60, 63, 70, 122, 147
Robert E. Mates and Susan Lazarus:
Cat. no. 124
Herbert Matter: Cat. nos. 101, 127
202
EXHIBITION 74/3
5000 copies of this catalogue designed by Malcolm Grear Designers
have been typeset by Dumar Typesetting, Inc.
and printed by The Meriden Gravure Co.
in March 1974 for the Trustees of
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on the occasion of
Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition.
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