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Lot Essay
The years towards the end of and immediately following the Second World War marked the development of Giacometti's mature style, as he moved away from the Surrealist experiments in which he had been engaged during the early 1930s and focused on the haunting, attenuated figures which would occupy him for the majority of his career. Like many of his contemporaries, Giacometti fled the Paris studio he shared with his brother Diego in 1942 and spent the remainder of the war years in his native Switzerland. He returned to Paris in late 1945, eager to return to his pursuit of representational art based on study from life.
During his self-imposed exile, Giacometti experimented obsessively with the creation of tiny, matchstick-like plaster representations of the human form, chiseling blocks of plaster down to virtual nothingness. "There is no escape from matter," Yves Bonnefoy has written of this sculptor's incessant explorations, "nor from the three dimensional space with which it confronts the sculptor's ambition. If he should resort to trickery, trying to use matter against matter, by exploring the infinitely small...its laws would not yield, they would simply manifest themselves differently" (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 278). Following years of experimentation in Switzerland, Giacometti returned to Paris in the fall of 1945 clutching matchboxes filled with the fruits of his labor.
The present work was conceived circa 1939-1945 and in its scale demonstrates the artist's newfound fascination with the miniscule as well as the reductive chiseling methods with which he had experimented during the war. Of the tiny plasters and the few resultant bronzes of the mid-1940s, Bonnefoy has commented, “For sculpture was just beginning, under his very eyes, to free itself from the domination of its materiality, which kept apart the components of Being, abandoning them in space. Art will reabsorb matter, as Giacometti would say, real likeness is possible at last. But it is also true that materiality and fragmentation have not yet entirely disappeared from the little statue: whence the temptation to get smaller and smaller, to plunge as deeply as possible into the abyss within which, like gold in the alembic, Being would emerge at last through the image” (ibid., p. 276).
During his self-imposed exile, Giacometti experimented obsessively with the creation of tiny, matchstick-like plaster representations of the human form, chiseling blocks of plaster down to virtual nothingness. "There is no escape from matter," Yves Bonnefoy has written of this sculptor's incessant explorations, "nor from the three dimensional space with which it confronts the sculptor's ambition. If he should resort to trickery, trying to use matter against matter, by exploring the infinitely small...its laws would not yield, they would simply manifest themselves differently" (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 278). Following years of experimentation in Switzerland, Giacometti returned to Paris in the fall of 1945 clutching matchboxes filled with the fruits of his labor.
The present work was conceived circa 1939-1945 and in its scale demonstrates the artist's newfound fascination with the miniscule as well as the reductive chiseling methods with which he had experimented during the war. Of the tiny plasters and the few resultant bronzes of the mid-1940s, Bonnefoy has commented, “For sculpture was just beginning, under his very eyes, to free itself from the domination of its materiality, which kept apart the components of Being, abandoning them in space. Art will reabsorb matter, as Giacometti would say, real likeness is possible at last. But it is also true that materiality and fragmentation have not yet entirely disappeared from the little statue: whence the temptation to get smaller and smaller, to plunge as deeply as possible into the abyss within which, like gold in the alembic, Being would emerge at last through the image” (ibid., p. 276).