Pierre Matisse, New York (acquired in 1958)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, October 25, 1972, lot 44
Acquired at the above sale

Tokyo, The Seibu Museum of Art, Alberto Giacometti exposition au Japon, 1983, no. 28

Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, illustration of another cast p. 264
Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1984, no. 115, illustration of another cast p. 79

Attractive gold/brown patina. There are a few flecks of red paint. Apart from some minor vert de gris in places, some very light surface dirt in the crevices and wear consistent with age and handling, this work is in overall very good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In January 1948, a few years before the present work was conceived, Alberto Giacometti was given his first one-man show in fifteen years by Pierre Matisse in New York. Though Giacometti already had a mythical underground reputation amongst the Parisian intelligentsia, few had actually seen his recent work. This legendary exhibition showed what he had been busy experimenting with since his break from Surrealism, introduced him properly to America and sparked the artist's meteoric rise to international fame. According to David Sylvester its catalogue was "like a talisman," whose notoriety did indeed ensure that the implications of the exhibition continued long after the works came down. It was as the preface to this catalogue that Sartre's essay "The Search for the Absolute" was first published. Laurie Wilson has argued that "even more than Giacometti's words, Sartre's text set a course for interpretations of Giacometti's post war work that hasn't been challenged in fifty years" (Laurie Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man, London, 2003, p. 232).

Every one of Giacometti's adventures, ideas, desires and dreams are projected into his figures, whose perpetual metamorphosis is reflective of his changing moods and attitudes. Sartre expresses delight at Giacometti's assertion that his sculptures were made to last for a mere few hours and comparing their transience to that of a dawn, or a sadness. He talks of the "perishable grace" of the statues and of the strange flour-like plaster, and argues that "never before has a material been less eternal, more fragile, more close to being human." Sartre applauds Giacometti's sensitivity to the fluctuations of life, which prevents the figures from ever being definitive depictions: "Giacometti never talks of eternity, and never even thinks of it" (Jean-Paul Sartre, "La Recherche de l'absolu" in Situations, III, Paris, 1949, n.p., translated from the French).

Sartre dismisses the expanded gestures of other sculptors who "put too much in their works" in favor of Giacometti's reductive approach. Though Giacometti knows that no part of the human body is redundant, he is also aware that "space is a cancer upon being, and eats everything; to sculpt for him is to take the fat off space." It could well have been with the plaster of the present work in mind that Sartre wrote the wonderfully evocative words about "a woman complete whose delicious plumpness is haunted by a secret thinness, and whose terrible thinness by a suave plumpness, a complete woman, in danger on this earth, and yet not utterly of this earth, and who lives and tells us of the astonishing adventure of the flesh, our adventure." There is much to learn about human experience from an engagement with these sculptures. In an essay that both forecasted and helped to generate Giacometti's mythical reputation, Sartre accurately predicts that "men are going to come to his place to strip it, and carry off all his works, even to the plaster that covers the floor" (ibid., n.p.).