Nature morte avec bouteille, 1963

<p><i>Nature morte avec bouteille</i> [still life with bottle] is a shimmering work of draughtsmanship by one of the most</p><p>important European artists of the twentieth century. The work depicts a table in the artist’s studio with a</p><p>bottle and a pile of books. Behind the table stands an easel with a painting on it. Like his contemporary</p><p>Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti forged a highly individual reputation founded on a small number of</p><p>original artistic innovations. His personal style of draughtsmanship was characterised by an accumulation of</p><p>rapidly repeated markings in soft pencil. Rather than treat his subjects with stylised definition, the</p><p>accumulated markings suggest with great subtlety the interaction between a three-dimensional object and</p><p>the light which falls upon it. Giacometti’s sensibility for the plasticity of objects, their volume and shape, was</p><p>highly refined and developed from his experience as a sculptor. Surfaces in these drawings are fluid not</p><p>solid, yet the weight and superficial appearance of the subject is registered with precision in each finished</p><p>work. The strength of outlines in the drawing are carefully modulated to suggest the relative proximity of</p><p>objects, with stronger markings evoking those objects close at hand.</p><p><br /></p><p>Giacometti depicted still-life subjects in paintings and drawings from the late 1930s until the end of his life.</p><p>These works are inseparable from his depictions of the studio interior which he began making at the same</p><p>period. His living and working spaces assumed a position of overwhelming importance in his art as he</p><p>socialised less and increasingly devoted himself to his art. The confines of his life, studied with growing</p><p>intensity, became concurrently more important in his practice. As he grew older the range of his subjectmatter</p><p>narrowed until the few remaining topics – portraits of his family and depictions of a familiar room –</p><p>attained a profound visual intensity. An empty chair or the sculptures in his studio were studied with the same</p><p>intensity as portraits of his family members. One elaborately decorated hanging lamp was of particular</p><p>interest in 1963 (fig. 1), as were the same few high-shouldered, short-necked bottles apparent in<i> Nature</i></p><p><i>morte avec bouteille.</i> Similar bottles appeared in a painting of 1956, known either as <i>Nature morte avec des</i></p><p><i>bouteilles</i> or <i>Les Bouteilles</i>, and many bottles were kept on a desk in his Paris studio, as is clear from several</p><p>photographs taken in the 1950s and 1960s (fig. 2).</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Nature morte avec bouteille</i> was made at a time of acute personal difficulty for the artist. In February 1963, he</p><p>underwent an operation for stomach cancer. He was subsequently unable to work for several months</p><p>afterwards, except for making drawings. It is possible that this drawing was one of those which Giacometti</p><p>made after the operation. His convalescence began at home in Paris and continued at Stampa, the Swiss</p><p>village of his birth, where his mother still lived and where he maintained a studio.1 (His mother died in January</p><p>the following year.) Also in this period, Giacometti made a series of five drawings depicting a hotel room</p><p>(Chambre d’hôtel). The same table and chairs by the same window are re-iterated from different</p><p>perspectives, under different light and with different contents filling the table.</p><p><br /></p><p>Each of Giacometti’s pencil drawings had an integrity of subject and medium: a small piece of the world is</p><p>captured in a sonorous act of representation. He did not make pencil drawings in preparation for his paintings and sculptures. Writing in 1984, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel described how Giacometti made <span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>increasing use of the rubber towards the end of his life, ‘not to correct mistakes but to infringe on form, </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>which, corrected or not, seemed to him an external approach both to the object and to himself.’2 The </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>suggestion is that Giacometti sought to re-make the objects themselves in his drawing, as if his pencil </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>markings were giving expression to some pre-existing presence. Furthermore, the repetition of outlines </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>served ’to identify in an unfolding process the emergence of a contour.’3 The final appearance of the </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>drawing is therefore inseparable from the self-evident process of its making. Though his subject-matter was </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>elementary, being derived from the interiors where he lived and worked, he used a soulful investigation of </span><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”>form to invest these light-infused spaces with great visual power.</span></p><p><span style=“background-color:initial;letter-spacing:0.2px;”><br /></span></p><p>A label attached to the back of this drawing shows that it was handled by Noah Goldowsky (1909–1978), a</p><p>Belarussian emigré who established himself as an art dealer in New York. Goldowsky was originally in</p><p>partnership with another dealer Bud C. Holland in the 1950s but was bought out in 1961. From that time, he</p><p>established his own independent commercial gallery, moving to premises at 25 East 83rd Street and</p><p>remaining in business until the mid-1970s. Goldowsky specialised in European modernist art and held</p><p>various exhibitions of work by Auguste Herbin, Piet Mondrian, Man Ray and others.</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite his ill health, the end of Giacometti’s career was marked by accolades and widespread recognition.</p><p>In 1962, he won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. Several retrospectives of his work were organised in</p><p>the 1960s, including those at Kunsthaus Zurich in 1962/63 and Galerie Beyeler in 1963. As his energy for</p><p>sculpture ebbed, his draughtsmanship flowed and he produced works such as <i>Nature morte avec bouteille</i></p><p>which speak of his immediate environment with intimacy and seemingly limitless fascination. This work</p><p>belongs to a significant theme in his oeuvre and is a fine example of his late style of draughtsmanship.</p>