Alberto Giacometti

Annette Giacometti
Acquired from the above

Félix-Jacques Moulin, Giacometti : Sculptures, New York, 1964, another example illustrated pl. 20
Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1965, another example illustrated p. 75
Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, no. 262, another example illustrated pp. 262 & 276
Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, St Paul-de-Vence, 1972, no. 104, another example illustrated n.p.
Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti : Une Biographie de son œuvre, Paris, 1991, no. 515, another example illustrated p. 510 
Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966 (exhibition catalogue), London, 1996, another example no. 208, p. 185, illustrated pl. 68

The bronze is sound. There is an attractive dark brown matte patina with inherent green and light brown variations. Apart from some very minor traces of normal wear, this work is in excellent original condition.
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Created around 1960, Buste d’Annette (dit Venise)is one of the iconic depictions that Giacometti created of his muse Annette Arm. This bronze reveals an incised, at times even scarified surface, and shows the importance of the human gaze in Giacometti’s sculptures.

The couple had met in Geneva during the Second World War when Annette was barely twenty years old, and in 1946 the young woman joined him in Paris before becoming his wife three years later. The artist had immediately been fascinated by Annette, and particularly with her deep brown eyes that he repeatedly depicted in his works of art. Annette became Giacometti’s muse and inspired many paintings and drawings, she was the universal woman of his sculptures. Jean Starobinski described her as a young woman “who faces one directly, who looks and speaks and behaves directly, infinitely frank and infinitely reserved, with wonderful straightforwardness' (John Starobinski in Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 357). But aside from a few small sculptures from 1946, it was not until the beginning of the 1960s that Giacometti decided to depict his wife’s features in bronze through a series of sculptures of which Buste d’Annette (dit Venise) is a beautiful example. This choice to immortalise her so late in his career coincides with a time during which their relationship had become increasingly tense. Indeed a year earlier Giacometti had met a woman named Caroline, who would occupy an important place in his life during his final years. This might explain why Giacometti, who had begun to see Annette in a new light, decided to sculpt this striking portrait of her. Despite all the turmoil in their relationship, Annette continued to visit her husband regularly in his studio, and the artist executed a remarkable series of busts representing her.

Characterised by an emotional and psychological distance between the artist and his model, Giacometti’s sculptures create a certain remoteness between the viewer and the work. The artist felt that is was precisely the relationship that he had with his model that was the cause of this,  their intimacy disappeared once the models were submitted to his intense scrutiny. In Buste d’Annette (dit Venise), this distance is reinforced by the intensity of Annette’s gaze, which seems to be staring at the viewer. In his biography of the artist, James Lord describes how Giacometti's first, and lasting, impression of Annette had been of her deep brown eyes. He notes how "Alberto was struck at once by the quality of the gaze" (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1985, p. 230). Giacometti explained how he felt that "When you look at a face you always look at the eyes.... Now the strange thing is, when you represent the eye precisely, you risk destroying exactly what you are after, namely the gaze.... In none of my sculptures since the war have I represented the eye precisely.  I indicate the position of the eye.  And I very often use a vertical line in place of the pupil.  It's the curve of the eyeball one sees.  And it gives the impression of the gaze.... When I get the curve of the eyeball right, then I've got the socket; when I get the socket, I've got the nostrils, the point of the nose, the mouth... and all of this together might just produce the gaze, without one's having to concentrate on the eye itself" (Conversation with Jacques Dupin in the movie Alberto Giacometti by Ernst Scheidegger and Peter Münger, 1965).