Fondation Giacometti

Collectors and patrons of the arts of the surrealists, the Viscount and Viscountess Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles were among the first collectors of Giacometti. Among other things they bought the “Gazing Head” as early as 1929, during an exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher which introduced Giacometti into the surrealist entourage, and they commissioned the artist with a stone figure for the garden of their villa at Hyères (1930-1932). Giacometti remained very close to the Noailles even after he left the surrealist movement in 1935. He made a series of portraits of Marie-Laure Noailles as drawing and sculpture in 1946 and 1947. This portrait can be dated from around 1946, just after Giacometti returned to Paris in September 1945, coming from Switzerland where he had lived during the war. It is one of a group of sculptures made at the time, before the artist found in 1947 the elongated style that was to make him famous. Since 1938 Giacometti had been making sculptures of very small size: “I was doing it despite myself. I didn’t understand. I began big and finished miniscule. Only the minuscule appeared to me to have some likeness,” the artist said in an interview in 1951. Though the small size of the character conveys the reduced dimension of a figure, when one sees it at a certain distance, the large pedestal was used by the artist as a way to re-establish a just relation of proportion between the figure and the space that surrounds it. The bust and the neck of the model are barely sketched, as if they were springing out of the volume of the pedestal itself. The face is described with essential lines, and very little detail. In spite of that and the very small size of the work, the features of Marie-Laure de Noailles – her oval face and elongated nose – are easily recognizable. Never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, it was not until 1973 that the plaster of this work was cast in bronze.

Signature and cast number on side of the base to its proper right "A. Giacometti 7/8"

Annette GIACOMETTI
Private collection
Private collection
Sale Christie's New York New York, NY (United States Of America), May 7th, 2008, lot n ° 438
Private collection

2011 Alberto Giacometti. Der Ursprung des Raumes, Salzbourg (Austria), Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, from March 26th to July 3rd 2011

Impressionist and Modern Art. Day Sale, New York, NY : Christie's New York, 2008, lot no. 438, p. 210, ill. p. 211
Markus BRUDERLIN, Toni STOOSS (under the direction of), Alberto Giacometti. Der Ursprung des Raumes, Ostfildern : HATJE CANTZ VERLAG, 2010 / Wolfsbourg : Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2010 / Salzbourg : Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, 2010, p. 77, ill. p. 77