[...] Giacometti once more does nothing other than present the impossibility of comprehending and possessing, i.e. capturing the objective vision. He thus confirms yet again that all of his production is nothing other than one great meta-artistic work in which the only thing that counts is the creative process.

One of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors as well as a painter and printmaker, Alberto Giacometti explored in his work both the impossibility of capturing reality in art and the possibility, in line with Paul Cézanne’s approach, of developing a synthesis of the artist’s perception of the world and especially the human figure. Giacometti’s work is indeed characterised from the outset by an obsession with the relationship between reality and perception in which the artist’s reproduction of the former is influenced by lived experience, also in emotive terms, and the interference of memory even when addressing the model. The idea of perception as unstable and altered by feelings, memories, light and time forms an ideal link between his art and that of Medardo Rosso, whose greatest heir Giacometti unquestionably is, in the attempt to capture the instant of perception. 

One of the most original practitioners of Surrealism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period of detachment from reality, Giacometti started working with models again in 1935. It was, however, above all in the period immediately after the war, which he spent in Switzerland, and after his return to Paris in 1946, that the artist developed the mature style for which he is best known, midway between the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau- Ponty¹ and the existentialism of Jean- Paul Sartre, one of the most famous interpreters of his work. 

The works produced in this period are mainly standing female nudes and portrait busts of his brother Diego. The Cerruti sculpture belongs to the former category and was produced in 1953 in at least four versions under the general title Nu debout (Standing Nude). To be specific, it is copy 0 of 6 of the third version, Nu debout III, very similar to Nu debout II, the plaster version of which is now in the Giacometti Foundation in Paris. The other known casts of this series are 1/6 (Zurich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, GS 048) and 2/6.² Bearing the number 0/6, the work in the Cerruti Collection could be an artist’s proof or an hors série cast belonging to the gallery owner Giulio Urbinati, from whom it was purchased. 

The woman portrayed is the artist’s wife Annette Arm, the woman he met in 1943 and married in 1949, his primary model all through the postwar years. By comparison with the very slender and elongated figures for which he is famous, e.g. the Femmes de Venise of 1956, the Nu debout series is characterised by comparatively small measurements (varying in height from 16 to 55 cm) and above all by the accentuation of more specifically female elements such as prominent breasts, wide hips and flowing hair. The formal focus on curves rather than slender, linear verticality ultimately conjures up a sacred figure, an archaic goddess of fertility. As is known, Giacometti’s mature work draws on the sculpture of antiquity, Greek and Egyptian on the one hand, Italic and Etruscan on the other. These models are, however, only a kind of intellectual filter for the sculptor, who always worked from life, with models posing at a set distance, so as to capture only what he saw (and how he saw it) in front of him. The discourse developed is eminently spatial, and key importance attaches in this context to the base on which each sculpture rests, simultaneously a support and the representation of real space. The comparatively small measurements are also closely connected with the desire to portray the subject seen at a distance, in space, not as large as it really is but as it is perceived due to the spatial gap. In focusing attention on the impossibility of capturing the woman and her nakedness, Giacometti once more does nothing other than present the impossibility of comprehending and possessing, i.e. capturing the objective vision. He thus confirms yet again that all of his production is nothing other than one great meta-artistic work in which the only thing that counts is the creative process.³ 

Matteo Piccioni 

¹ Scacco 2017. 

² Ascona 1985, p. 54, no. 4. 

³ Bonnefoy 1991.