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Provenance: Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 26 March 1985, lot 60.
Jan Krugier Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the late owner, December 1999.
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Exhibited: Venice, XXXI Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Venezia, 1962, no. 278.
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Alberto Giacometti, 1990, p. 588, no. 274 (illustrated in color, p. 589).
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Literature: Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 467, no. 453 (illustrated in color).
G. Soavi and P. Knapp, Giacometti, Paris, 1991, p. 233 (illustrated).
The Alberto Giacometti Database, no. 859.
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Notes: The Collection of Alice Lawrence
According to his biographer James Lord, Giacometti acknowledged in retrospect that he had "spent the war years meditating on Cézanne's ambitions and achievements" (in Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1983, p. 229). Already a legendary figure when Giacometti first arrived in Paris in 1922, "Papa" Cézanne had once famously declared that he would astonish the city with an apple. The apple would take on mythic proportions in Cézanne's still-life paintings, and the green apple suggestively included in Vase de fleurs alludes to Giacometti's profound identification with Cézanne (fig. 1), who "had taught him that only absolute fidelity to psychic and visual experience, however surprising or unpredictable, can mark an artistic work with integrity" (ibid., p. 104).
For Cézanne, Giacometti understood, the "apple on the table was always, and by a long shot, beyond every possibility of presentation. He could only bring himself a little closer" (quoted in M. Matter, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1987, p. 209). With regard to his own work, he admitted, "Each time I work, I am ready without a moment's hesitation to undo all that I did the day before because each day I have the impression that I see further" (quoted in ibid., p. 194). The impossibility of representation resulted, in the work of both artists, in paintings that are not only non finito but, almost by definition, unfinishable. The petrified incompletion of Giacometti's paintings, and his dissatisfaction with any fixed state, stem on the one hand from the logical impossibility of capturing any ephemeral phenomenon in paint and, on the other, from a deep-seated desire to bring his approximations of reality closer to its essential form.
Whatever the imperfections of representation, Giacometti, by his own account, painted precisely "to get a grip on reality" (quoted in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, exh. cat., New Haven, 2001, p. 37). The reality he sought was a necessarily subjective one, contingent upon the ephemeral experience of sensation and of appearances that endure and disperse in the act of observation. The present still-life has the forceful and epigrammatic qualities of a drawing rendered in oil paints on canvas, while at the same time in the rapid whorls and insistent indecision of his lines Giacometti ambivalently conveys an intentional indeterminateness and imprecision of detail. The bottle and yellow-green lines of color overlap with discontinuous skeins of pink and black paint, countering the vertigo of the empty white canvas. With these greatly restricted means Giacometti has nevertheless carved out an implication of depth, and through the compulsive energy and multiplying intensity of his line, he has convinced us of the presence of these flowers, branches, vase and apple, in which fragmentary and unfinished form is perceived as being convincing in their essence, and whole.
The tension between form and space evoked by the constructive, conceptual lines of Vase de fleurs further mirrors the phenomenological experience of the artist-viewer, raised to a new self-awareness through subjective experience. Giacometti, an intimate of Sartre and Beckett in postwar Paris, understood the nature of existentialism and its imperatives to create meaning in one's own life and to embrace existence when reality becomes uncertain. Giacometti reflected, "The most transitory things are not the flowers [for a still life] but us and the painting. The flowers continue growing undisturbed, and their melancholy has nothing in common with our black thoughts... Yes, it does--for people, life keeps going on, too, just as for flowers" (quoted in R. Hohl, ed., Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Stuttgart, 1998, p. 160).
Cézanne, Le vase bleu, 1885-86, Musée d'Orsay, Paris BARCODE 25247817
