Alberto Giacometti

Private collection, Japan
Acquired from the above in the early 1990s

Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, 1992, no. 15, illustration of another cast pp. 60-61
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 1989, no. 2, illustration of another cast pp. 18-19

This work is in very good original condition. The bronze is sound with an attractive light brown patina with warm yellow tones. There is a light build-up of dust in the crevices and some very minor wear to the most protruding areas. There is some hatching visible on the side of the square form which is original to the work.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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While Alberto Giacometti may best be known for his lone-standing, eloganted figures, his early Cubist works from the 1920s are equally central to understanding his artistic practice and philosophy. Born in 1901, in Stampa, Switzerland, the son of well-known Post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti was encouraged to start painting, drawing, and sculpting by age nine. His earliest works were figurative; he often drew still lifes and portraits of family members who would pose for him. Giacometti soon encountered works by such avant-garde masters as Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Archipenko, and Pablo Picasso, whose Cubist artwork had a great impact on his future artistic pursuits.

In 1922, Giacometti moved to Paris and soon set up his first studio on rue Froidevaux, where he worked alongside his brother Diego. In a letter to Pierre Matisse from 1947, the artist wrote of his early ambitions and frustrations of the 1920s: “If…one began by analyzing a detail, the end of the nose, for example, one was lost. One could have spent a lifetime without achieving a result. The form dissolved, it was little more than granules moving over a deep black void, the distance between one wing of the nose and the other is like the Sahara, without end, nothing to fix one’s gaze upon, everything escapes. Since I wanted nevertheless to realize a little of what I saw, I began as a last resort to work at home from memory. I tried to do what I could to avoid this catastrophe. This yielded, after many attempts touching on cubism, one necessarily had to touch on it (it is too long to explain now) objects which were for me the closest I could come to my vision of reality” (as quoted in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965, p. 15).

Concerned with existentialist theories and the desire to capture human perception of reality, Giacometti created a unique series of Cubist sculptures between 1925 and 1927, a group which includes the present work. Its asymmetrical geometry and rough surfaces represent the artist’s temporary embrace of abstraction, adopting a wholly modern approach to form. Discussing Giacometti’s first abstract sculptures, Christian Klemm writes, “Just as Giacometti was addressing the polarity of geometric forms and organic vitality, he was also deliberating on another problem: how to isolate and clarify individual elements so that each could become a succinct sign, while at the same time making each dynamically indispensable to the configuration as a whole. In a succession of different ways these seemingly irresolvable issues would define his entire oeuvre. The contradictions intrinsic to Giacometti’s work mean that directional impulses do not flow freely outward nor do they work together as a unit. Rather, they remain as though caught within the sculptures—giving them a tormented quality and imbuing them with the unattainable quality of magic” (Christian Klemm, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 2001, p. 56).

 

Fig 1 Alternate view of the present work

Fig. 2 A letter from Alberto Giacometti to Pierre Matisse from 1947