ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966)

To the manner born, it was indeed inevitable that Alberto Giacometti became an artist. Giovanni Giacometti, a noted Swiss Impressionist and engraver, named fellow painter Cuno Amiet to be his first-born son’s godfather; Ferdinand Hodler accepted this role for the last of Giovanni’s four children, Bruno. Alberto grew up in his father’s studios in Stampa and Maloja; he enjoyed drawing, and practiced by copying intricate, old master prints. He was attracted, from early on, to both sculpture and painting. While in his mid-teens, circa 1915, he modelled his first head, a portrait of his brother Diego, and completed his first, surviving oil painting, a still life of apples.

In 1922 Giacometti arrived in Paris to study sculpture, and for the next five years irregularly attended classes in the studio of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He also painted, especially during summer vacations at home, in the familiar surroundings of his father’s studios. The present Pommes de terre, modelled in a closely harmonized facture of warm, earthen tones—like an early Van Gogh painting—while veined and contoured with a cool, darker, bluish hue, projects a sculpted, weightily palpable presence of convex objects. The encrusted build-up of impastoed pigment, like tinted modelling plaster, reinforces the rustic, material aspect of the artist’s subject and setting. Already apparent in Giacometti’s painting from life is the guiding influence of the probing, interrogative vision and painstaking, additive method he admired in the art of Paul Cézanne, by which he would abide and triumph, some three decades hence, in his sculptures and paintings of the post-war period.

As very few examples of still-life painting exist from Giacometti’s oeuvre, Pommes de terre remains a rare entity. It is nonetheless a premonitory one in its meditation, by proxy via the humble potato, on the sustenance of humanity and the fragility of nature with which it is inexorably interconnected. David Sylvester recalled, in Giacometti's own words, "The days pass, and I delude myself that I am trapping, holding back, what's fleeting" and points to the example of Cézanne who had stated, according to Joachim Gasquet, "Everything we see vanishes, doesn't it? Nature is always the same, but nothing remains of it, of what we see. Our art has to inspire a feeling of its permanence while still showing the elements of all its changes. It has to make us sense it as eternal" (quoted in Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, p. 35). Here, in contemplating the focussed central subject of Pommes de terre, we are presented with the distinctive quietude and contemplation requested of us by the still-life genre. We encounter a modern vanitas, bringing to the fore the same concept of finite natural and human existence that would famously emerge in Giacometti’s most significant masterpieces later on; his elongated and tentative, attenuated, structures embodying the existential dilemma through the human body. As such, Giacometti’s contemplative and reduced composition of a bowl of potatoes on a simple wooden table therefore presents us with the same enduring themes he would pursue throughout his career, in the artist’s distinctive simplicity of form, even at this early stage.