Fondation Giacometti

Having arrived in Paris in 1922, Alberto Giacometti, after having worked in several places beforehand, settled in a studio in 1926 located at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in the southern part of Montparnasse. This studio, from which he never moved, appeared in several drawings and engravings on which one can recognize his furniture and the works in progress, canvases on the easel, clay or plaster pieces on small turntables, tables and stools. In this drawing, one finds the elements characteristic of the architecture of that small 23 square meters space: on the right a figure standing on a stool, on the left a smaller figure on a small turntable, behind it the table on which, next to the bottles (in which the artist kept the turpentine he used when he painted) one recognizes the Grand buste with arm from 1957. In the background, the window-panes of the studio’s big picture window are masked in their lower part by a big sheet Giacometti stretched across and whose folds make two large transversal curves. The drawing used to belong to the gallery owner Jacques Matarasso, who perhaps purchased it directly from the artist. Matarasso, whose gallery was situated in Nice, was in contact with Giacometti in 1961, when he commissioned an engraving for the book “Arthur Rimbaud vu par les peintres contemporains”, that he published in 1962. This drawing, because of its technique, the blue ballpoint pen and its subject, can be placed on a par with the drawings made to illustrate an edition of a text by Jean Genet made in 1962 by Scheidegger.

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