Fondation Giacometti

This portrait represents Annette, the artist’s wife, in the kitchen of the Giacometti’s family house in Stampa, in the canton of Grisons (Switzerland). The couple used to go every year to Alberto’s childhood house, where his mother lived until her death in January 1964. Behind Annette’s bust, one can make out the base of the vault that covered the kitchen. Annette, sitting full face, hands resting on her legs, is captured frontally. The pencil, that traces the décor with a few strokes, lingers especially on Annette’s face, whose features are marked then reworked with an abrasive rubber, the rubber creating gaps where the stroke only subsists as a trace. Above all else, Giacometti wanted to frame the face, which is at the centre of the work, and paradoxically though the pencil does not linger on the eyes, the gaze is strongly depicted, marked with vertical strokes that stretch its brightness on the whole face. Proof of this interest, on the reverse is the sketch of the model’s eyes only, very close to the drawings conceived by the artist for the monograph devoted to him in 1962 by Jacques Dupin at Editions Maeght (published the following year, in 1963). The drawing was purchased by Gustav Zumsteg (1915-2005) from the Parisian gallery of Aimé Maeght, which offered Giacometti’s work to a European clientele. The owner of the Abraham silk company, and the famous Zurich restaurant “Kronenhalle”, Gustav Zumsteg was close to Aimé Maeght, from whom he bought numerous works, some of them presented on the walls of his restaurant. In 1962, Zumsteg commissioned a lithograph from Alberto Giacometti to illustrate the book celebrating his hundred-year-old restaurant, which was then still managed by his mother Hulda. In the same year, Zumsteg lent this drawing for the big retrospective of Giacometti’s work at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

Signed and dated with a pencil at the bottom right corner 1955 "Alberto Giacometti / 1955"

Private collection
Yves SAINT LAURENT
Pierre BERGE
Sale Christie's Paris Paris (France), February 23rd, 2009, lot n ° 36

1962 Meisterzeichnunger. René Auberjonois. Alberto Giacometti. Robert Schürch. Louis , Lucerne (Switzerland), Kunstmuseum Luzern, from June 3rd to July 8th 1962, no. 48
1962 Alberto Giacometti, Zurich (Switzerland), Kunsthaus Zürich, from December 2nd 1962 to January 6th 1963, no. 218

Meisterzeichnungen René Auberjonois. Alberto Giacometti. Robert Schürch. Louis Soutter, Lucerne : Kunstmuseum, 1962, cat. no. 48, p. 6
Alberto Giacometti, Zurich : Kunsthaus, 1962, cat. no. 218, p. 38
Collection Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Bergé. Art impressionniste et Moderne, Paris : Christie's Paris, 2009, lot no. 36