Fondation Giacometti

Among his drawings depicting landscapes, Alberto Giacometti has often manifested his interest for trees whose correspondences with the human figure he has explored for example in a series of drawings preparatory to a colour print, at the beginning of the Fifties. It was mainly views of Stampa that are recognizable in these landscapes, where the structure divided in trunk and branches is used as a graphic metaphor for the circulation of the artist’s gaze on the scene and is conveyed in a dense network of lines on the sheet. Regularly each year he went to the family house, in the canton of Grisons, and very often drew the village streets, with trees, sometimes limiting his work to the representation of the vegetation. On this drawing, made in Stampa, a tree in the foreground occupies the centre of the sheet, the lines disappearing at the edges, restoring the impression left by the artist’s vision, focussed on what he drew and what was at the centre of his gaze, to the detriment of the rest of the environment. Behind the imbricated venations of the strokes that constitute the branches, one can recognize the architecture of the houses, in the background, and the line of the very high horizon, revealing the presence in the background of the mountains that enclose the gaze in that region of Val Bregaglia.

The drawing is a promised gift from Michael A. Rubenstein to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Nork.

Signed and dated with a pencil at the bottom right corner "Alberto Giacometti 1960"

Alberto GIACOMETTI
John REWALD
Private collection
Private collection
Private collection
Private collection

1962 XXXI Biennale internazionale d'arte, Venice (Italy), Biennale d'arte, from June 16th to October 7th 1962
1970 Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Rome (Italy), Villa Medici, from October 24th to December 18th 1970, no. 24
1985 Alberto Giacometti. Dessins, Paris (France), Galerie Claude Bernard, no. 62
2012 Alberto Giacometti. Dessins. En hommage à Claude Pompidou, Paris (France), Galerie Claude Bernard, from December 13th 2012 to February 2nd 2013
2013 Salon du dessin 2013, Paris (France), Palais de la Bourse, from 10th to April 15th 2013

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Rome : De Luca Editore, 1970, cat. no. 24, p. 34
Alberto Giacometti. Dessins, Paris : Galerie Claude Bernard, 1985, cat. no. 62, p. 86
Louis Gabriel CLAYEUX, Alberto Giacometti. Dessins, Paris : Galerie Claude Bernard, 2012, cat. no. 21