Alberto Giacometti

Faerber and Maison, London
Acquired from the above in 1967

The sheet has light staining and foxing/mold staining on the recto. The verso shows moisture caused stains and has white paper tape adhered to all edges. The sheet has no tears abrasions or paper losses. It is my expectation that this piece should respond well to cleaning treatments. This report was kindly provided by the paper conservator Alan Firkser.
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The representation of female figures provides almost half of Giacometti's artistic output. His first model, and perhaps most influential woman in his life, was his mother Annetta. She never travelled outside Switzerland and Giacometti regularly visited her, his family home providing a welcome retreat from the exhausting rhythm of Paris life. These interludes also provided an important artist function; they gave him an opportunity to develop his artistic ideas in works which were not constrained by the nature of the commission. The present work, dating from 1951, comes from the period in which the artist had abandoned the precise rendering of objects in pursuit of the more elusive goal of evoking the surrounding space. The room almost engulfs his diminutive seated figure, the table and walls impressing themselves on the huddled form of his mother, who seems to be shrinking from the surrounding space. 

 

Annetta was a powerful character and her domineering influence has often been utilized as a psychoanalytical basis for interpreting Giacometti's distorted depictions of women. However the imagery he used to represent women, from the reductive figures for which he is best known, to the surreal, fetishistic objects inspired by surrealist writings, were driven by the artist's obsession with the nature of perception, and to reduce these to an expression of Freudian psychoses fails to do the works justice. As in the present work, the contorted subject is less a result of the artist's view of woman, more a legacy of his struggles with the nature of perception. As Giacometti commented in an interview in 1945, "In all works of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist is conscious of it or not. The lesser or greater formal qualities are only a sign of the greater or lesser obsession of the artist with his subject; the form is always a measure of the obsession. But what one should look for is the origin of the subject and of the obsession; it isn't necessarily Freudian" (Alberto Giacometti, 'About Jacques Callot', Labyrinthe, April 15, 1945).

Fig. 1 The artist drawing (photo: Ernst Scheidegger)