.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Painted in 1949, Nu debout can be placed squarely in the critical period of Giacometti's career not long after the end of the Second World War, a time when he began creating his most celebrated and iconic works. Within a span of only several years, between 1946 and 1949, Giacometti was able to break free from what had been nearly a decade of sometimes crippling uncertainty and doubt about his work and arrived at a deeply personal, vehemently imagined, and profoundly radical conception of the human presence in art, creating an iconic body of work that quickly came to be appreciated as embodying, in the most searching and universal terms, both the despair and the courage of the human spirit caught up in the throes of a convulsive century.
The figure paintings of this period often treat subjects Giacometti was modeling concurrently in plaster. Indeed, it is known that the paintings were often—as is probably the case here—based on sculptures. Giacometti used the presence of the sculptures in his studio as if they were the bodies of living models: even if their flesh was but plaster or clay, they nonetheless occupied real space, and helped him understand how the figure exists in and interacts with space. Drawing, modeling and painting were activities that were equally integral to the process of Giacometti's image-making. Drawing induced him to model the figure, sculpting led him to explore the illusionism of representation on canvas, and painting stimulated the urge to draw. Giacometti continually worked back and forth between two and three dimensions, and desired to be recognized for his achievement equally in drawing, painting and sculpture.
Giacometti's female nudes owe little, if anything, to the conventions of the subject. Posed frontally as in the present work, rigidly seated or standing bolt upright, his women display nothing like the flowing contours of a Matisse odalisque or the clever and deforming linear machinations of a late Picasso nude. As can be seen here, Giacometti’s female nude exists apart from all of this: she is absolutely naked, completely and utterly exposed. She possesses an extraordinarily commanding presence, towering, distant, imperturbable and untouchable. The working of her figure is equally intense and groundbreaking—she appears to have been conceived and brought forth in a flash of incandescent inspiration. Like a religious icon, she completely dominates the space she inhabits, and although she appears impassive, her presence is confrontational.
The figure paintings of this period often treat subjects Giacometti was modeling concurrently in plaster. Indeed, it is known that the paintings were often—as is probably the case here—based on sculptures. Giacometti used the presence of the sculptures in his studio as if they were the bodies of living models: even if their flesh was but plaster or clay, they nonetheless occupied real space, and helped him understand how the figure exists in and interacts with space. Drawing, modeling and painting were activities that were equally integral to the process of Giacometti's image-making. Drawing induced him to model the figure, sculpting led him to explore the illusionism of representation on canvas, and painting stimulated the urge to draw. Giacometti continually worked back and forth between two and three dimensions, and desired to be recognized for his achievement equally in drawing, painting and sculpture.
Giacometti's female nudes owe little, if anything, to the conventions of the subject. Posed frontally as in the present work, rigidly seated or standing bolt upright, his women display nothing like the flowing contours of a Matisse odalisque or the clever and deforming linear machinations of a late Picasso nude. As can be seen here, Giacometti’s female nude exists apart from all of this: she is absolutely naked, completely and utterly exposed. She possesses an extraordinarily commanding presence, towering, distant, imperturbable and untouchable. The working of her figure is equally intense and groundbreaking—she appears to have been conceived and brought forth in a flash of incandescent inspiration. Like a religious icon, she completely dominates the space she inhabits, and although she appears impassive, her presence is confrontational.