Fondation Giacometti

The young Alberto Giacometti familiarized himself with the arts from an early age, being in contact with the works and practise of his father, the Swiss impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, and through the discovery of the old masters in the illustrated books that constituted his father’s library. Alberto quickly showed a gift for drawing, enriching his practise of reproduction of motif through copying the images in those books. On the front of this sheet, a bird is represented nestling in a clump of reeds and marsh plants. The attention brought to the detail of the vegetation, the posture of the bird, the clarity of the composition centred on the animal harmoniously arranged in its environment, leads us to believe that it is a copy from a reproduction, rather than a realization from life. The drawing made on the other side is more accurately speaking a child’s drawing, where the freedom of the treatment of space and the multiplication of the small figures are expressed, what one finds again in other drawings by the artist from those same years, with that same very parsimonious and already deliberate use of colour whose small touches dress the characters. However, though the other side is a drawing made for fun, the front, by the very quality of its realization, acknowledged by the addition of a big and clear signature, reminds us that Giacometti had very early on given a predominant place to the practise of art in his life and had wished, like his father, to make a profession out of it. The drawing has remained in Giacometti’s family, at the house of the daughter of one of Alberto’s paternal uncles.

Signed with a pencil at the bottom left corner "Giacometti Alberto"

Private collection
Private collection
Sale Christie's Zurich (Switzerland), December 1st, 2008, lot n ° 150

Swiss Art, Zurich 8032 : Christie's, 2008, lot no. 150