‘I can consider separately from the tree itself this wavering branch’, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘but I cannot think of an arm rising, a fist closing, apart from a human agent. A man raises his arm, a man clenches his fist; man is the indissoluble unity and the absolute source of his movements’. He made this statement in The Search for the Absolute, his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Giacometti’s sculptures at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1948 (Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 1948, p. 3), in which this cast of La Main was included. The hand is our prime intermediary between the mind and the world, it allows thought to act upon and transform the world. The outstretched hand expresses the human need to grasp, to reach out towards the world and to aspire within it; the hand enables us to realize our potential in accomplishing all things. In the face of another, the hand may embrace in love or ward off in fear, extend itself in joy or lamentation. No part of the human body, except for the head itself, is a more potent symbol for the totality of the human endeavour. Giacometti’s La Main, as fragile as it may appear, carries the emotional and symbolic weight of all these gestures. 

Giacometti created three sculptures during 1947 that represent parts of the human body – La Main, Le Nez and Tête sur tige – as he set out to work on the first of the famously thin, elongated signature sculptures Christian Klemm has called his ‘ethereal, weightless figures’. In making these sculptures Giacometti returned to the lessons he had learned as a young man while studying in Bourdelle’s Académie de le Grande Chaumière, at a time when ‘Giacometti found it easier to form individual parts than whole figures’, as Klemm has noted; ‘acting on that inclination in his first works in many years to approach life size, he opted for the fragmentary’ (C. Klemm, Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 146). The artist commented, ‘All I could do was to make a part which would stand for the whole, and that, moreover, was the way I saw things’ (quoted in T. Stooss & P. Elliott, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exh. cat., Vienna, 1996, p. 161). In his standing figures Giacometti preferred to avoid particular gestures; only in L’homme au doigt; executed in the same year as La Main, does the sculptor draw attention to the hand as it is engaged in a specific and purposeful movement.

These body part sculptures are, however, no mere preparatory exercises. The overall scale and inter-related complexity of the elements in these works are a marked contrast from the miniscule figures and heads that Giacometti brought back with him from Geneva when he returned to Paris in September 1945, following the end of the Second World War. He is said to have carried the sum of his surviving wartime production in several matchboxes. He realized that he had come to a sterile end with these ‘pin people’. Giacometti declared, ‘In 1945 I swore to myself that I didn’t want to let my figures get smaller and smaller, not even by an inch. But now the following happened: I could maintain the height, but they started to get narrow, narrow tall and thin as a thread’. The artist moreover observed that ‘You don’t feel your weight. I wanted – without having thought about it – to reproduce this lightness, and that by making the body so thin’ (quoted in R. Hohl, ed., Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Osfildern-Ruit, 1998, pp. 108 & 125).

The accelerating evolution in Giacometti’s work during the years 1945-1947 stemmed from a sequence of hallucinatory revelations that the sculptor experienced as he reintegrated himself within the cosmopolitan life of Paris, as the city emerged from the deep nightmarish sleep of the Occupation and, amid continuing privations, slowly returned to life during the years following the Liberation. These epiphanies reveal the ways in which the inner life of the artist’s mind contended with the reality of the outer world and the circumstances of his existence. They trace a continuation of the pre-war surrealist impulse in the sculptor’s life and work. In December 1946 Giacometti published a visionary text in the art journal Labyrinthe which he titled Le Rêve, Le Sphinx et la mort de T., referring to a favourite brothel that had just been closed down by a new city ordinance, and the death of a close friend, Tonio Pototsching, who acted as caretaker of the building in which the sculptor had his studio. As Klemm has pointed out, ‘In his text there is a point of reference for each of the new sculptures’ (C. Klemm, op. cit., 2001, p. 146).

In the Rêve sequence of the text, Giacometti dreamed he saw two enormous spiders, the second, as he wrote, ‘far more monstrous than the first spider... Terror struck, I saw my girlfriend’s hand reach out and touch the spider’s scales: she did not seem to feel either fear or surprise. With a cry, I pushed her hand away and, as in the dream, I asked for the creature to be killed’. Later he described his friend Pototsching, as he lay – having died only moments before – on a bed in a room adjoining his own:

‘I saw him dead, with his skeletally thin limbs stretched out, opened up and abandoned from the body, with his enormous, swollen belly, his head thrown back and his mouth open. Never had a corpse seemed so meaningless to me I looked at the head, which had become an object, an insignificant little box... The following night I was about to go naked down the corridor leading to the bathroom which went past the dead man’s bedroom, I was filled with terror and, although I didn’t believe it, I had the vague impression that T. was everywhere, everywhere except in that miserable corpse on the bed, that corpse which had seemed so meaningless to me. T. was beyond all bounds, and terrified of feeling an icy hand touch me on the arm, I made a huge effort to go down the corridor, then came back to bed and with my eyes open, I talked to A. until dawn’ (quoted in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, exh. cat., Norwich, 2001, p. 31).

Tonio’s passing reminded Giacometti of his first encounter with death, when in 1921 he accompanied an elderly Dutchman named Van Meurs on a trip through the Alps on their way to Venice. The gentleman was ill, and died en route, as Alberto attended to him. Giacometti’s girlfriend ‘A.’ in Le Rêve is Annette Arm, the young woman whom the artist met in a Geneva brasserie in 1943. She arrived in Paris on 6 July 1946 to live with Giacometti in his studio at 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Montparnasse. They married in 1949. The references to her arm in the text Le Rêve strongly suggest that Giacometti had in mind a female limb when he modelled La Main. Annette’s last name, which signifies the same in both English and German, may be more than a coincidence in this regard.

A feminine source of inspiration for La Main is moreover born out by another event in Giacometti’s life that commentators have cited, which took place in June 1940 during the German invasion of France. Alberto buried his sculptures in a corner of his studio, and together with his brother Diego and the latter’s girlfriend Nelly, fled Paris ahead of advancing German forces. They followed roads south, with Bordeaux as their destination. Two days later, they witnessed the immediate aftermath of an air raid on the town of Etampes, thirteen miles from Paris. ‘Buildings were in ruins, burning’, James Lord has written. ‘A human arm, severed at the
shoulder, lay in the road, and they realized it must have come from a woman’s body, because a bracelet of green stones still circled the wrist. Farther on, they came to a wide, shallow crater where a bomb had recently fallen; around it lay several bodies, torn limbs... The street was running with blood’ (J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1986, p. 214).

Giacometti and his companions then joined the exodus of refugees that streamed along the highway beyond Etampes, and were strafed by German planes. Five days into their journey, they were overtaken by German troops, and decided they had no choice but to return to Paris, witnessing once again the carnage they had tried to escape. Lord has written, ‘The sculpture [La Main] assumes searing significance as a haphazard item from the inventory of human horror. It shows again how Giacometti worked to fuse the personal with the universal’ (quoted in J. Lord, op. cit., 1986, p. 286). Jean Genet, in his 1957 essay The Studio of Giacometti, makes a point crucial to understanding Giacometti and his work:

‘Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude... Giacometti’s art seems to me determined to discover this secret wound in each being and even in each thing, in order to for it to illuminate them’ (in E. White, ed., The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, New York, 1993, p. 310).

The hand was an important component in several of Giacometti’s surrealist sculptures created during the early 1930s. In Main prise, a mannequin-like hand is enmeshed within the wheels and rods that comprise a mechanical device of uncertain function. In relating La Main to this earlier work, Yves Bonnefoy observed, ‘Giacometti realized that his hand, formerly caught by the fingers and inhibited, was now free to create, to speak, to show, perhaps even to exorcise... True, fear has not ceased, dangers abound, yet suddenly art has become possible’ (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, p. 329). A severed hand appears as if it were a still-life object in Table surréaliste, 1933. The arms in Mains tenant le vide (L’Objet invisible), 1934, were executed separately, and remained detachable; during the 1960s Giacometti made casts of the left arm.

Prior to executing La Main, Giacometti modelled a thin plaster figure on a raised platform, a woman with her hands outstretched before her, as if groping in the dark. He subsequently reworked the figure so that its gender was ambiguous, and this plaster was included in the 1948 Pierre Matisse exhibition as Sketch for a Burglar (The Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti possesses the fragmentary surviving version of this work). In 1952 the sculptor published a haiku-like poem, L’Aveugle avance la main, in XXe Siècle: ‘A blind man extends his hand in the void (in the dark? In the night?) / The days pass and I dream of catching, stopping that which flees’ (quoted in Alberto Giacometti 1901- 1966, exh. cat., Washington D.C., 1988, p. 126).

During 1946-1947 Giacometti fully realised his visionary, weightless approach to sculpture. He was creating astonishing heads, figures and parts of the body in attenuated, reduced forms, eliminating virtually all volume and mass, ranging from only a few inches in height to nearly life-size. These figures were utterly unprecedented, unless one went back to the most primitive works of ancient man.
Giacometti had made it his challenge and task to reinvent the very idea of sculpture.

Rather than fleshing out the form of La Main, as Rodin would have done in one of his sensuously expressive hands, Giacometti applied and then relentlessly carved away the drying plaster so that the material appears to have shrunk around and now desperately clings to the wire armature. There is no semblance of warm, living flesh as might comfort us – the resulting limb seems as brittle as a broken off and burnt tree branch. The vastness of surrounding empty space presses in on the limb from all sides, eating away at its substance, stressing, corroding and scarring the skin; that matter which endures possesses the pitted and gouged appearance of an unearthed fossilized life form. This fragile, weightless arm strains in supplication against the overwhelming compression of all these forces, the sum of which is no less powerful than mortality itself. The hand nonetheless acquires a compensatory shamanistic potency, the miraculous aura of a venerated saintly relic.

Peter Selz declared, ‘it exists with a mysterious power and contained violence’ (Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 1965, p. 11). This hand resists, holds forth defiantly, and struggles through the sheer resolve of its resilient will to counteract all that impinges upon it. The hand perseveres, survives, and somehow prevails – however tenuously – over these terrible conditions. There is a chilling though undeniable beauty in the arm’s gently curved form, balanced precariously on a slender metal rod. The hand ultimately overcomes the space in which it stands. The bony fingers beckon to us, and remind us: this is the fragility of life as all of us have experienced it, painfully, inexorably, and with no small measure of a private, ineffable heroism.

Pierre Matisse, the New York gallerist, had been closely following developments in Giacometti’s work since before the war, and now he was the sole admiring dealer who possessed the means to support the sculptor’s renewed efforts during the early Post-war period. Matisse realized it was high time to give the artist a solo show, his first in almost fifteen years. This would take place in New York, which would become the leading venue in the genesis and expansion of Giacometti’s international reputation.

Giacometti selected Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading writer and thinker of the Paris existentialist set, to provide the introductory catalogue essay. Sartre rose to the occasion with The Search for the Absolute, which sixty years on remains an essential, classic text on Giacometti and his work. Sartre wrote:
‘With space...Giacometti has to make a man; he has to write movement into the total immobility, unity into the infinite multiplicity, the absolute into the purely relative, the future into the eternally present, the chatter of signs into the obstinate silence of things... The passion of sculpture is to make oneself totally spatial, so that from the depth of space, the statue of a man may sally forth... Once he had a terror of emptiness; for months, he came and went in an abyss at his side; space had come to know through him its desolate sterility. Another time, it seemed to him that objects, dulled and dead, no longer touched the earth, he inhabited a floating universe, he knows in his flesh, and to the point of martyrdom, that there is neither high nor low in space, nor real contact between things; but at the same time, he knew that the sculptor’s task is to carve in this infinite archipelago the full form of the only being who can touch other beings’ (in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 1948, p. 3).

Nineteen of the twenty-nine sculptures that Giacometti sent to New York were recent, having been done in 1945- 1947. Of these, nine were shown as bronze casts, including the present cast of La Main; the rest were original plaster sculptures, many of which were later cast in bronze. Pierre Matisse financed the casting process, using the Alexis Rudier foundry, which had worked with Rodin, and whose excellent work did not come cheap. All of the authorized bronze casts that exist of La Main, including the present one, were cast by Rudier between 1947 and 1949. Giacometti relished the opportunity to transcribe his original plaster sculptures into bronze. He became even more exacting in his efforts, and self-critical of the results. He wrote to Matisse, ‘I simply cannot bear the idea of casting these sculptures in bronze before they are more or less what I want them to be’. He later expressed his gratitude to Matisse, ‘You have rendered me an immense service in allowing me to have these casts made. For the last year, I could never have afforded to have one made at my expense... You cannot know how much all this has helped me in my work. I have made great progress since we began to work together’ (quoted in J. Russell, Matisse: Father & Son, New York, 1999, pp. 152 & 155).

Giacometti’s exhibition, comprised of twenty-nine sculptures, two paintings and two drawings, opened at the Pierre Matisse Gallery on 19 January 1948. It turned into a major event, and became the talk of the art world. If critical reception initially seemed hesitant, it was only because it would take time to mull over this approachable but nonetheless formidable body of work, which called into play – in a way New York had not yet experienced – many of the complex and anxious issues that comprised the zeitgeist in Post-war Europe. The show proved to be a commercial success as well; eight of the important sculptures were sold within the year.

The large and continuous turnout for the exhibition led Matisse to extend the viewing. An article in Time magazine included photographs of two works. Giacometti was delighted at this public response, and wrote Matisse, ‘in Paris everyone wants to have the catalogue, and those who have seen it find it very, very good’ (quoted in J. Russell, op. cit., 1999., p. 162). But even with this sudden renown, one thought was foremost in Giacometti’s mind. From his family home in Stampa, he wrote to Matisse, ‘no sooner do I think of it than I long to be back in Paris and at work on my sculptures. Everything I have done so far is just a beginning’ (quoted in J. Russell, op. cit., p. 161).

This work is offered alongside three other masterworks by Giacometti from the same Important Private Collection, including Femme de Venise II, which was conceived in 1956 and cast in the artist’s lifetime (estimate: £8-12 million). Displaying an extraordinary and rare golden patination, the present cast belongs to the renowned series of sculptures known as the Femmes de Venise, comprising nine individual but closely related figures cast in bronze, which played a significant role in establishing Giacometti’s fame and reputation as the most important sculptor of the Post-war era. They were created in response to a landmark invitation from the French government to exhibit in the main gallery of the state pavillion at the 1956 Venice Biennale; Giacometti also agreed to a major retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern that would run concurrently. Keen to show only his very latest sculptures, Giacometti decided to create a series of standing nude women, and set to work in early 1956, initiating a rush of sustained and feverish activity that lasted until the end of May. Using a single armature, Giacometti worked and reworked the figures almost daily; his brother Diego making plaster casts, which required only a few hours pause in Alberto’s work, whenever he had achieved a result that interested him at that moment. 

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Femme de Venise II, signed and numbered ‘4/6 Alberto Giacometti' (on the left side of the base); inscribed with the foundry mark 'Susse Fr Paris’ (on the back of the base), bronze with gold patina. Height: 47 in. (120.5 cm.). Conceived in 1956 and cast in the artist’s lifetime. Estimate £8,000,000 – £12,000,000 ($13,632,000 - $20,448,000). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2014

Provenance: Galerie Maeght, Paris.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (no. 8491).
J. Daniel Weitzman, New York, by 1960.
Acquired by the present owner before 1982.

Literature: F. Meyer, Alberto Giacometti: Eine Kunst existentieller Wirklichkeit, Stuttgart, 1968, p. 196.
R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Painting, Drawings, London, 1972, no. 119, p. 307 (another cast illustrated pl. 119).
J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1986, pp. 355-358 & 485.
Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, no. 374, p. 400 (another cast illustrated).
A. Schneider, Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Munich, 1994, fig. 108-114 (another cast illustrated).
T. Dufrêne, Alberto Giacometti: Portrait de Jean Genet, le scribe captive, Paris, 1991, p. 168.
D. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1997, pp. 85 & 117.

Exhibited: Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966, September - November 1988, no. 82; this exhibition later travelled to San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, December 1988 - January 1989, no. 82, p. 200 (illustrated).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Alberto Giacometti, May - September 2001, no. 159; this exhibition later travelled to New York, Museum of Modern Art, October 2001 - January 2002.
Shawinigan, Quebec, The National Gallery of Canada, The Body Transformed, June - October 2003.
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada (on loan from the present owner, 2003 - 2004).

Notes: With its extraordinary burnished golden patination, the present cast belongs to the renowned series of sculptures known as the Femmes de Venise, comprising nine individual but closely related figures cast in bronze, which played a significant role in establishing Giacometti’s fame and reputation as the most important sculptor of the Post-war era. Christian Klemm has stated, ‘The Women of Venice mark the halfway point in Giacometti’s mature work; they bring together the different characteristics of his figures. The evocative name, which binds the individual figures into one group despite their differences, had an enhancing effect: as the figures became legendary, they came to be regarded as the epitome of his art. The extremely small, distant heads and the innovatively sloping pedestals, from which the oversize feet grow, still make them seem like revelatory, illusionistic visions. The tension in the mingling of goddess and concubine, of Egyptian cult image and decomposing corpse, is seen nowhere as vividly as in this group’ (quoted inAlberto Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 218).

Giacometti created the Femmes de Venise in response to an invitation from the French government, which had hitherto displayed little recognition of the sculptor’s achievement, to exhibit selections from his oeuvre in the main gallery of the state pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale, which was scheduled to open in June. Giacometti also agreed to a major retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern that would run concurrently with the Biennale. The artist was disinclined to rely heavily on older work when deciding what to send to the Biennale. He generally preferred to show his very latest sculptures when he exhibited, as his brother Diego commented, ‘He was never satisfied with anything and wanted to reject everything, make something better, and only did the work the day before’ (quoted in R. Hohl, ed.,Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Osfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 154). The landmark occasion of the Biennale, together with the larger Bern event, clearly called for a maximum effort, and demanded results that would serve as a direct and up-to-date statement of his work at this stage in his career. Giacometti decided to create a series of standing nude women, and set to work in early 1956, initiating a rush of sustained and feverish activity that lasted until the end of May. 

Using a single armature, Giacometti worked and reworked the clay figures almost daily. A compulsive sense of doubt and self-criticism was essential to his creative method, as the sculptor relentlessly built up, broke down, and often even destroyed his figures-in-progress. He desired that these new sculptures should be understood as having evolved by means of this exploratory, touch-and-go process. Instead of aiming towards a final and conclusive state, and then settling on a single outcome that would mark the sum of his efforts to that point, Giacometti wanted to reveal the very process of making the figures by tracking their changing and varied states. The sculptor had his brother Diego make a plaster cast of the clay figure, which required only a few hours pause in his work, whenever he had achieved a result that interested him at the moment. 

The ‘weightless and visionary’ figures, those attenuated standing women and walking men of the late 1940s, which had won Giacometti sudden international fame, had mainly been the conception of the sculptor’s imagination. Around 1950, when it seemed to Giacometti that he could no longer mine this vein of expression without repeating himself and turning it into a tired mannerism, he returned – as he had done in the early 1930s following his surrealist works – to working directly from a model, nearly always his wife Annette for the standing female nudes, in order to restore a compelling sense of individual physical presence to his figures, so that they would convincingly occupy the space in which they exist. Compared to earlier sculptures, the women of the Nu debout series of the early 1950s possess voluptuous figures – large breasts and wide hips – and display an overtly sexual and fertile character that seemed surprising coming on the heels of the sculptor’s previous leanly attenuated figures. When it came time to create the women for the Biennale, Giacometti wanted to affect a synthesis of all his resources, combining insights he had taken from his life studies, while still pursuing an inner vision of his subject.

Giacometti, therefore, did not work from a living model – that is, his wife Annette – while modelling the Femmes de Venise. Instead he created mainly from memory, and while also capitalising on his recent experience of having worked so intensively from life, he proceeded to shape a daily procession of female figures with the spontaneous, instinctual and practiced motions of his skilful hands.
James Lord has described this process: ‘In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor’s fingers coursed over the clay. Not one of these states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea of form. Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement’ (quoted in R. Hohl, ed., op. cit., pp. 355-56).

Among the plaster casts that Giacometti decided to keep, David Sylvester has noted that ‘the last of the states was no more definitive than its predecessors. All were provisional. And from his point of view, every head and standing figure was a state, hardly more than a means towards doing the next’ (D. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, p. 85).
The Femmes de Venise ultimately came to comprise nine figures, preserved in plaster and subsequently cast in bronze, which are numbered from I to IX. Giacometti actually elected to show ten plasters that summer: six were dispatched to the Biennale, while four went to Bern. Giacometti’s process of self-critical selectivity remained in force, even after the exhibitions had ended. One of the plasters shown in Venice, and two of the Bern figures were not cast in bronze.

One of the latter is in the collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. Giacometti presumably destroyed the others. Some of the plasters that had stayed behind in Paris and which Giacometti decided to preserve were subsequently cast to constitute the final series of nine Femmes de Venise we know today. Bronze casts of the nineFemmes de Venise were first shown together as a group at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in May 1958, and most recently at Pace/Wildenstein, New York, and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in 2005-2006.

The numbering of the nine Femmes de Venise in bronze does not necessarily reflect the specific order in which their plaster models were executed. It does seem likely, however, that Femme de Venise I was done early, if not first of all, in the sequence. Closely related to the preceding series of Nus debouts, her figure is the most robustly naturalistic, with pronounced and expressively modelled female features; she stands like a modern version of a prehistoric fertility fetish. From this point onward, the idea of slimming elongation would take increasing precedence in Giacometti’s modelling of the figures, a tendency which represents the retrospective aspect of this series, harking back to the weightless and visionary style of the late 1940s. Femme de Venise II is a distinct counterpoint to the naturalism of Femme de Venise Iand is further developed in Femme de Venise VII and its sisters; these sculptures celebrate the abstracted qualities of the figure, using the torso like a tablet relief showcasing graphic articulation and expressionism. The arms are subsumed into the torso completely, the only literal denotations of the female subject coming from the delicately upturned face and flowing hair. The head of Femme Venise II is among the smallest in the series relative to the height of the body. Giacometti has nonetheless imparted great beauty to its shape and has given her visage a refined character as she gazes in self-absorbed contemplation into the distance.

The novelist and playwright Jean Genet, whom Giacometti regarded as his favourite living author, is widely considered to have written the most illuminating contemporary study of the sculptor’s everyday life and his work in the essay ‘The Studio of Alberto Giacometti’ which Galerie Maeght published in its magazine Derrière le miroir in 1957.

Genet recounted how he was repeatedly drawn to the Femmes de Venise during the numerous visits he made to the sculptor’s studio: ‘They give me this odd feeling: they are familiar, they walk in the street, yet they are in the depths of time, at the source of all being; they keep approaching and retreating in a sovereign immobility. If my gaze attempts to tame them, to approach them, then – but not furiously, not ranting or raging, simply by means of a distance between them and myself that I had not noticed, a distance so compressed and reduced it made them seem quite close – they take their distance and keep it: it is because this distance between them and myself has suddenly unfolded. Where are they going?

Although their image remains visible, where are they? ‘I keep coming back to these women, cast in bronze now... around them space vibrates. Nothing is any longer at rest. Perhaps because each angle (made with Giacometti’s thumb when he was modelling the clay) or curve, or lump, or crest, or torn tip of metal are themselves not at rest. Each of them still emits the sensibility that created them. No point, no ridge that outlines or lacerates space is dead.

‘I can’t stop touching the statues: I look away and my hand continues its discoveries of its own accord: neck, head, nape of the neck, shoulders... The sensations flow to my fingertips. Each one is different, so that my hand traverses an extremely varied and vivid landscape... The backs of these women may be more human than their fronts. The nape of the neck, the shoulders, the small of the back, the buttocks seem to have been modeled more lovingly than any of the fronts. Seen from three quarters, this oscillation from woman to goddess may be what is most disturbing: sometimes the emotion is unbearable... I cannot help returning to this race of gilded—and sometimes painted – sentries who, standing erect, motionless, keep watch’ (in E. White, ed., trans. Richard Howard, The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, New York, 1993, pp. 317, 323 & 324).

In 1957, a year after completing the Femmes de Venise and around the time Genet published his essay, Giacometti wrote: ‘I have certainly been painting and sculpting to get a better grip on reality to see better, to understand things around me better, to understand better as to be free as big as possible, to spend myself as much as possible in what I do, to discover new worlds, to wage my war for the pleasure of winning and losing’ (A. Giacometti, ‘My Reality’, in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, exh. cat., Norwich, 2001, p. 37). James Lord has observed that ‘With the entire accumulation of this stylistic skill – wrought by a sheer disbelief in its efficacy – Giacometti was moving towards a greater and greater simplicity of means, which showed that he was going, as he had always meant to go, toward a confrontation with what was most difficult’ (J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1986, p. 357).

The other two stellar works from the collection both depict Giacometti’s wife Annette. Portrait de femme (Annette) dates from 1954, one of the artist’s highpoints of his portraiture; it shows his wife seated within one of the most complex visual armatures of his career (estimate: £3.5-5.5 million). Annette IV, conceived in 1962 and cast in the artist’s lifetime, is one in a series of ten portrait busts that Giacometti created of his wife between 1962 and 1965 (estimate: £1.5-2 million). This work demonstrates the artist’s assertion that sculpture should capture an essential quality of the sitter through an extreme measure of style rather than exact physiognomic representation. 

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Portrait de femme (Annette), oil on canvas,36 1/4 x 29 in. (92 x 73 cm.). Painted in 1954. Estimate £3,500,000 – £5,500,000 ($5,964,000 - $9,372,000). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2014

Provenance: Larry Aldrich, New York, by 1962.
J.J. Klejman Gallery, New York.
Robert & Marjorie Graff, New York, by 1978.
The Lefevre Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in December 1984.

Literature: J. Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, p. 126 (illustrated).
Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, a Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, no. 395, p. 415 (illustrated). 

Exhibited: Saint-Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght, Alberto Giacometti, July - September 1978, no. 150, p. 196 (illustrated p. 133).
Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Alberto Giacometti, June - October 1998, no. 63 (illustrated).
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada (on loan from the present owner, 2003 - 2004).
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Giacometti and Bacon, November - December 2008.
New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Alberto Giacometti, Painted Portraits, May - July 2010.

Notes: The present work, first illustrated in 1962 in Jacques Dupin's important monograph on the artist, shows Alberto Giacometti's wife seated within one of the most complex visual armatures of his career. It dates from 1954, one of the highpoints of his portraiture. Within the composition, the figure of Annette, shown in her entirety, is surrounded by the spectral paraphernalia of the artist’s own domain, the leaning canvases and other accoutrements. She sits, dwarfed by her surroundings, at the centre of a maelstrom of paint. And in fact, she herself has been conjured through an even more concentrated vortex of brushstrokes, each one adding a sense of volume and presence to her body and, in particular, her face. Indeed, the focus of the composition appears to be the dark recesses of her eyes, as Giacometti seeks to capture his wife’s intense gaze.

Giacometti first met Annette Arm in 1943 in Geneva, where he was in an enforced exile during the Second World War and the Occupation of Paris, where he had previously settled. He was immediately struck by the directness of her gaze. Giacometti was already concerned with the concept of le regard, the look that could essentially encompass and epitomise a person. In Annette, a young girl interested in art but still under the guardianship of her parents, this gaze was already present. As Jean Starobinski would recall, ‘When Annette appeared at his side in Geneva, I said to myself that she was expected: a young woman who faces one directly, who looks and speaks and behaves directly, infinitely frank and infinitely reserved, with wonderful straightforwardness’ (J. Starobinski in Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 356). It was as though a muse perfectly suited to Giacometti had been provided by fate. Discussing her gaze, Simone de Beauvoir would remark: ‘Her eyes devoured the world. She couldn’t stand missing anything or anyone; she liked violence and laughed about everything’ (de Beauvoir, quoted in The Women of Giacometti, exh. cat., New York, 2005, p. 19).

After the War, Annette accompanied Giacometti back to Paris, and became one of the most important inspirations and subjects in his work, dominating a large swathe of his output for the last two decades of his life. She was the inspiration behind some of the sculpted figures, and appeared again and again in his drawings. In the immediate post-war years, Giacometti was far from wealthy; he therefore painted seldom, as he could hardly afford the materials. However, as the 1940s came to an end, he gained increasing success and increasing means. This was reflected in his return - with gusto - to painting. He was now able to continue the research that he had begun in his pictures of 1937 in particular, creating structures through an armature of lines that owed their existence to his drawings and sculptures alike. This is evident in Annette assise in the general composition, and also in the near-sculptural effect that the thickly-worked figure at its centre has attained. Annette has been depicted through a succession of lines, many of which are near vertical or near horizontal, echoing the structure of the canvas itself. In terms of execution, this picture owes a great deal to Giacometti’s drawings: he has modelled her figure through this built-up mesh of brushstrokes as well as wider streaks of colour. 

Annette was part of the triumvirate of subjects who featured most often in Giacometti’s work, alongside his mother and brother. Although a handful of other subjects would come to feature in his pictures, including the Japanese professor Isaku Yanaihara, it was that crucial trio to which he returned again and again. In a sense, this reflects Giacometti’s never-ending search for the absolute in his sculptures and drawings as well as in his paintings. Looking at the same model again and again provided a constant; however, it also meant that the more he stared at the same person, the more alien they came to appear to him. As Giacometti explained, ‘When my wife poses for me, after three days, she no longer looks like herself. I absolutely do not recognise her any longer’ (Giacometti, quoted in V. Wiesinger, ‘Giacometti’s Studio: A Site of Unbounded Adventure’, in The Studio of Alberto Giacometti: Collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, exh. cat., Paris, 2007, p. 39).

It was this revelation, this ability to stare at the familiar until it became wholly unfamiliar, that obsessed Giacometti and allowed him the tantalising prospect of working towards some fundamental truth, as though he were building up forms within his pictures and, by doing so, chiselling away everything superfluous to the absolute resemblance that he sought. ‘It is as though reality were continually behind curtains one is tearing away,’ he explained. ‘There is still another... always another... But I have the impression, or the illusion, that I make progress each day. It is this that motivates me to act as though one ought damned well to get to understand the very kernel of life’ (Giacometti, quoted in H. & M. Matter, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1987, p. 216).

The early years of the 1950s are often considered to be one of the most important periods of Giacometti’s work, and one of the happiest periods for him. He was enjoying increasing recognition, including his first one-man show in a museum that year, in Santa Barbara, California. Despite their probing, inquisitive and even tentative nature, his paintings nonetheless had an assurance, and this had demonstrably increased over the span of the previous years, resulting in a new stylisation. This is obvious in the gradual shift that had occurred in his pictures during this time. For instance, looking at the 1949 Portrait of Annette in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the background is well articulated yet devoid of the framing device so much in evidence in Annette assise. Another, more elongated painting from the following year, also in MoMA, shows the dominance of the figure in the composition, yet has also introduced the framing device seen in Annette assise. Here, the more elaborate receding borders above and to the sides of Annette serve as an analogue to the frame itself, locating the figure firmly within the canvas, while also perhaps relating to the numerous doorways and structures of the narrow space that Giacometti himself inhabited.

Intriguingly, in Annette assise, the space itself has less detailing than those earlier pictures, and less texture, allowing the figure to float within a less defined dimension. This marks the shift from the ‘real’ space delineated in the earlier paintings to the more abstract realm within which the figures are increasingly shown in the later ones; Annette assisedates from the very period of transition. This is made all the more evident by Giacometti’s deliberate softening of the paint in the area around Annette, which has a halo-like appearance, creating a contrast with the densely-textured brushwork that comprises her form and therefore thrusting her figure into near relief. At the same time, Giacometti has allowed much of the space in Annette assise to dwarf the figure, introducing a more vivid sense of scale and distance, aligning this work with his iconic sculptures; this was a trait that would be a constant in Giacometti’s paintings from the post-war period, capturing a palpable sense of the gap - sometimes vast - between artist and subject. Despite the constraints of the studio, he nonetheless captured the feeling of psychological distance between himself and Annette (or indeed Diego or his mother).

From 1956, Giacometti’s interest in the background in his figure paintings would diminish even more as he became less concerned with the Cézanne-like quest to locate the people he depicted in a ‘real’ space. From this time, his subjects would sometimes appear as gossamer-like meshes, fragile constructs shown against a nebulous setting. This was in part a result of the crisis that occurred when he tried to paint Yanaihara in 1956, an activity that he continued with dogged insistence over the following half decade. Yanaihara’s features baffled Giacometti and resulted in his deconstructing his entire process of painting. The foundations and precepts that he had formerly taken for granted were thrown into confusion during the so-called ‘Yanaihara Crisis’. Annette assise therefore dates from a key moment before Giacometti was forced to change tack dramatically in his paintings. 

Despite his increasing financial security during this time, the studio in which Annette appears to be shown in this painting remained the same, legendary, squalid succession of rooms that Giacometti had inhabited for years upon years. Like his works, it had a near archaeological character to it, with walls covered in drawings and paintings, a ceiling riddled with holes and surfaces covered with dust, clay and plaster. When Françoise Gilot, the lover of Pablo Picasso, visited Giacometti’s studio, she recalled:

‘I was struck by the degree to which the physical aspect of the place recalled Giacometti’s painting. The wooden walls seemed impregnated with the colour of clay, almost to the point of being made out of clay. We were at the centre of a world completely created by Giacometti... There was never the slightest colour accent anywhere to interfere with the endless uniform grey that covered everything’ (F. Gilot & C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, Toronto & London, 1964, pp. 204-05).

Looking at the subtle tones that dominate Annette assise, the viewer can discern the extent to which Giacometti’s pictures and his universe bled into one another. However, although the palette is dominated by ochres, browns and grisaille, there are flashes of colour, especially red, that add an electric jolt to the picture. Perhaps this reflects the continued influence of Giacometti’s father, who was also an acclaimed painter in his native Switzerland.

By the time that Alberto had an eye for such things, Giovanni Giacometti had developed a Post-Impressionist style in which he deployed techniques such as Divisionism. Looking at Giacometti’s own early works, this influence is clearly discernable; at the same time, the Divisionism, the breaking down of colour into individual elements and the emphasis on the surface of the work itself, can be seen to have informed Giacometti’s sculptural practice. Giacometti was brought up admiring the works of a range of daring artists of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries; indeed, his godfather was Cuno Amiet. Painting, therefore, was in his blood. In some ways, the return to painting in the post-war period can be seen as a fulfilment of his legacy; certainly, the reverence in which Giacometti himself held his father and his work indicates that there was a deep connection in his own mind between their works. However, looking at Annette assise, one cannot help but conclude that, of all the Post-Impressionists, it was Paul Cézanne who most influenced Giacometti. Here, Annette’s form has been broken down into the various elements and built up again, stroke by stroke; at the same time, the entire concept of the three-dimensional being shown in a two-dimensional medium is key to both artists. ‘Everything is a sphere, a cone, or a cylinder - it’s true,’ Giacometti would say. ‘Too bad I’m not the first to have made that observation. Cézanne was right’ (Giacometti, quoted in Matter, op. cit., 1987, p. 214).

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Annette IV, signed, numbered and inscribed with the foundry mark ‘4/6 Alberto Giacometti Susse Fondeur’ (on the back of the base), bronze with dark brown patina. Height: 22 5/8 in. (57.4 cm.). Conceived in 1962 and cast in the artist’s lifetime. Estimate £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,556,000 - $3,408,000). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2014

Provenance: Galerie Maeght, Paris.
Arnold & Fannie Askin, New York.
Aquavella Galleries, Inc., New York, by whom acquired from the above in 1980.
Donald Morris Gallery, Inc., Birmingham, MI, by whom acquired from the above in 1980.
John Stoller Gallery, Minneapolis.
Maurice & Margo Cohen, Montecito, by whom acquired from the above on 9 September 1980; sale, Christie’s, New York, 13 May 1999, lot 454.
Galerie Art Focus, Zurich.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2001.

Literature: R.J. Moulin, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paris, 1964, p. 24 (another cast illustrated).
R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Painting, Drawings, London, 1972, no. 263, p. 308 (another cast illustrated p. 263).
M. Miro, 'Detroit Pieces Measure Up in New Exhibition', in Detroit Free Press, 14 February 1982, p. 8G (another cast illustrated).
B. Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1984, no. 224, p. 155 (another cast illustrated).
H. & M. Matter, Alberto Giacometti, London, 1987, no. 172-73, p. 221 (another cast illustrated).
Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, no. 517 (another cast illustrated).
A. Schneider, Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, New York, 1994, no. 144 (another cast illustrated).

Exhibited: Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Alberto Giacometti, October 1969 - January 1970, no. 110, p. 153 (illustrated p. 82).
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Alberto Giacometti, July - September 1978, no. 110.
Detroit, Institute of Arts, Contemporary Art in Detroit Collections, January - March 1982.
Shawinigan, Quebec, The National Gallery of Canada, The Body Transformed, June - October 2003.
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada (on loan from the present owner).