Giacometti Annette: Venise, 1960
Giacometti
Annette: Venise, 1960
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Giacometti Annette: Venise, 1960
dickinson
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Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) Annette: Venise,1960 signed and numbered on the back Alberto Giacometti 6/6 inscribed with the foundry mark Susse Fondr Paris bronze with brown patina 46.5 x 26.5 x 12.7 cm. (183/8 x 103/8 x 5 in.) Conceived in 1960 and cast in 1964. The edition was 6. A further cast numbered 0/6 was made in 1976 (Giacometti Foundation)
Provenance The Artist Marguerite and AimĂŠ Maeght, Saint- Paul-de-Vence, acquired directly from the artist Maeght sale; Loudmer, Paris, Collection Marguerite et AimĂŠ Maeght, 27 Oct. 1982, lot 51 (illustrated) Private collection, Paris, bought at the above sale
Exhibited Zurich, Galerie Maeght, Nov. 1981- Jan. 1982, no. 23.
Literature F.-J. Moulin, Giacometti Sculptures, New York, 1964 (another cast illustrated pl.20) P. Selz, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1965 (painted cast illustrated p.75) R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1971, no. 262, p.308 (another cast illustrated pp. 262, 276) J. Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, St Paul-de-Vence, 1972, no.104 (painted cast illustrated) R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1974, no.19 (another cast illustrated p.107) Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Works, Paris, 1991, p. 510, no. 515 (another cast illustrated) T. Stoss, P. Elliot, Alberto Giacometti: 1901-1966, exhibition catalogue, London, 1996, p.185, no.208 (another cast illustrated in colour pl. 68). The Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation database, no AGD.2236 The Alberto and Annette Giacometti Association database, no. AGD 735 (cast no. 1/6)
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Annette: Venise, 1960
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Annette Giacometti Alberto Giacometti met Annette Arm in Geneva in 1943, during the Second World War. His friend Jean Starobinski recalled the exact moment: “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.” (Bonnefoy, 1991, p.356). Annette
Alexander Liberman, Alberto and Annette Giacometti in the Studio, 1951, Black and white photograph.
followed Giacometti to Paris in 1946 as his secretary and companion, and, to the surprise of many of his friends, the confirmed bachelor married the young Swiss woman three years later. By 1960, however, the year in which Giacometti sculpted the first bust of Annette in clay, the marriage was in a state of upheaval. It was the same year in which the artist first sculpted his friend, the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, with whom Annette had had an earlier romantic relationship. Though it had been conducted with Giacometti’s approval, a recent cooling between Annette and Yanaihara led to some tension during the sittings. In the previous year, Giacometti had met a pretty 20-year-old prostitute called Caroline who soon became his mistress and, after 1960, his muse. Despite her own affair with Yanaihara, Annette was intensely jealous of Caroline. The uneasy tension and turbulent emotions doubtless prompted Giacometti’s decision to turn his attention once more to Annette as his model, immortalising both her and their relationship in the series of ten portrait busts. Giacometti’s artistic process, in which he demanded of his models absolute immobility for hours on end, must have inspired him to look at Annette with fresh eyes in these final years before his death in 1966. As Giacometti himself said of the process of creating a portrait, “The more I work the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
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Anonymous, Annette Giacometti at Stampa, 1961, Black and white photograph.
Anonymous, Alberto and Anette accompanied by Isaku Yanaîhara, 1961, Black and white photograph.
Franco Cianetti, Giacometti Modelling a Bust of Annette, c.1962, Black and white photograph.
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This was not the first time Annette had posed for her husband; she featured in a number of drawings and paintings in the earlier years of their relationship, both seated and standing, nude and clothed. However, apart from a small early work dated 1946, this was the first time Giacometti had modelled Annette in sculpture; he was fifty-nine, and she was thirty-seven. There are in total ten editioned bronze portrait busts of Annette, the last of which, Annette X, was made the year before his death (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). The present work is the final cast (of an edition of six) of the first version, Annette: Venise, cast in 1964, four years after the original clay sculpture was modelled. As in all of the Annettes, we are struck by the highly-worked surface texture and crisp modelling, with the undulating, pinched surface of the original clay model serving as evidence of its facture. The figure – typical of Giacometti’s manner – is reduced to its essentials; in all except Annette II, the base is integrated into the bust itself. The patination is surprisingly colourful, appearing in different lights alternately bronze, gold, and almost greenish in hue, with bits of plaster from the mould still clinging to the surface.
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What strikes the viewer most immediately, of course, is Annette’s intense and fixed stare, the eyes incised into the wet clay with a pointed implement. The unblinking gaze was of paramount importance to the artist, and his close scrutiny of his model is wholly evident here. Indeed, Giacometti said of women: “The nearer one gets, the more distant they are” (quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, p. 30). We can follow
Ernst Scheidegger, Giacometti working on a portrait of Annette, c. 1950, Black and white photograph.
his struggle to capture in a fixed material the countenance of a woman simultaneously so intimately known and so remote. Both the Annette and the Diego series (the latter using his brother as model) are significant within Giacometti’s oeuvre for the unusual sense of closeness between artist and model. Typically, his figures are smaller than life size, contributing to and enhancing the profound sense of psychological remove between artist and subject (and, by extension, between viewer and subject). The sense of the isolation of the individual can be tied to the existentialist movement and in particular to the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Giacometti met and befriended in 1941. However, the scale of the Annette series is comparatively larger, and the figure is thus interpreted by the viewer as being more approximate, and therefore more intimate. Artistically, Giacometti found this physical closeness challenging, observing: “It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.” Stylistically, these late sculptures betray the artist’s ongoing interest in native African and Oceanic arts, a genre that had first impacted Western art with the Cubist experiments of Picasso.
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Giacometti & Maeght Giacometti was from 1947 represented by the Paris gallery of Aimé and Marguerite (“Guiguite”) Maeght, whose timely friendship with first Pierre Bonnard and, through Bonnard, Henri Matisse, had earned them a considerable fortune. Maeght enticed Giacometti to join his gallery by promising to fund the casting costs of the thirty-seven sculptures then collected in the artist’s studio, waiting to be cast in bronze. The first Giacometti exhibition at Galerie Maeght opened in the early summer of 1951. (Successive solo exhibition were staged in the summers of 1954; 1957; and 1961.) The title of the sculpture, Annette: Venise, pays homage to a city Giacometti had first visited in 1920 during his studies. Doubtless a cast of this sculpture was also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962. In October 1961, 10 days after his 60th birthday, Giacometti visited Venice at the invitation of the Biennale officials who wanted Giacometti to show a large group of works (paintings and sculptures) in the principal Pavilion. Returning to Venice in June 1962, with his brother Diego, he supervised the installation of 42 sculptures, 40 paintings and more than a dozen drawings. He was awarded the main prize for sculpture. This exhibition firmly established Giacometti on the international stage. In 1964, the year the present cast was made, André Malraux, Minister for Cultural Affairs, inaugurated the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The Giacometti courtyard, one of the world’s most famous “in situ” installations, was given over entirely and permanently to a group of sculptures selected and set in place by the artist.
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Annette: Venise, 1960
Giacometti at the Venice Bienalle, 1962, Black and white photograph.
Alexander Liberman, Annette and Giacometti in the studio in paris, 1962, Black and white photograph.
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The present cast of Annette: Venise was cast in 1964 and entered Marguerite and AimÊ Maeght’s private collection, where it remained until the sale of selected works from the Maeght Collection in 1982. This sculpture is sold with a certificate of authenticity issued by the Giacometti Committee, dated 17th December 2012. The work is referenced by the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in the Alberto Giacometti database (AGD) as number 2236.
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Confidential: Š Simon Dickinson Ltd 2013 This proposal is the property of Simon Dickinson Ltd and subject to contract, and is being provided on the basis that it, and all the information therein, is maintained in strict confidence, and is not disclosed to any third party
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