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Alberto Giacometti   1901-1966 LA FORET: SEPT FIGURES ET UNE TETE Inscribed A. Giacometti, numbered 2/6 and stamped with the foundry mark Alexis Rudier Fondeur, Paris Painted bronze height 21 7/8 in. 55.5 cm. Executed in 1950. The present work is one of three sculptural groups Giacometti completed in the spring of 1950. As the artist himself recounted later, the involuntary groupings of figures germinated from a number of independent plaster sculptures he executed in March and April of that year. While casually rearranging the plaster figures standing around in his studio, he observed that each one of them belonged to a determinate group. Giacometti recounted: "Every day during March and April 1950 I made three figure studies of different dimension, and also heads. I stopped without quite reaching what I was looking for, but unable to destroy these figures which were still standing up or to leave them lost in space. I started to make a compostion with three figures and one head, (La place: composition avec trois figures et une tete, fig. 1) a composition which... was done before I had come to think of it... A few days later, looking at the other figures which, in order to clear the table, had been placed on the floor at random, I realized that they formed two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for (La clairiere: composition avec neuf figurines, fig. 3, and the present work). I set up the two groups on platforms without changing their positions and afterwards worked on the figures altering neither positions nor dimensions..."(Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1965, p. 55). La foret epitomized the style Giacometti developed during the years immediately following the close of World War II, characterized by the tall, slender figures for which he is best known. No longer interested in re-creating physical likeness in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture the identity of his model beyond the physical reality of the human form. His figures underwent a process of reduction, an obliteration of the physical material which allowed him to grasp his subject and place it in space without being distracted by innumerable facial and body details. In his process of dematerializing and unmaking the figure, Giacometti elongated the vertical axis while reducing the thickness of his sculptures: the women in this work are thus composed of thin, almost insubstantial lines, lending the composition a weightless, almost impalpable quality. In this work the artist went further than ever before in exploring the spatial relationship between several figures in one composition by including the bust of a man, possibly his brother Diego, amongst the tall, gaunt female figures. It was no longer enough for Giacometti to recreate the frontal distance he felt existed between the model and himself: he now created spatial relationships within a single work through the employment of multiple figures on a common base. For Giacometti La foret also represents a return of his childhood impressions of the natural surroundings of Stampa, the village where he was born and where he kept a studio throughout his life. Speaking of the present work, the artist commented: "The composition with seven figures and a head reminded me of a forest corner seen for many years- that was during my childhood- and where trees, behind which could be seen granite boulders, with their naked and slender trunks, limbless almost to the top, had always appeared to me like personages immobilized in the course of their wanderings and talking among themselves" (op. cit., p. 55). The countryside of Stampa, with its gnarled trees, its rocky crevasses and its mountain peaks is reflected in this sculpture in Giacometti's approach to the material, in the striations, scratches, elongations that inform the figures and the solidity of the base. Comparing this female sculptural group with Giacometti's male subjects of the time, one quickly recognizes that the latter are nearly always represented in movement (La place II, fig. 4), walking or pointing- while the women stand immobile, rigid, their arms held at their sides and their feet firmly anchored. This underlines the ever-present influence of Egyptian art in Giacometti's work, in which the difference between the sexes is denoted by the position of their feet. The color Giacometti has added accentuates a reading of these female figures as the passive object of the artist's creative process, ultimately becoming objects of devotion and desire and taking on the universal status of symbol and icon. The pigmented surface and linear articulation add enormously to the expressive qualities of this work, rendering it truly exceptional. La foret and the other two sculptural groups Giacometti executed in 1950 have often been interpreted as expressing human solitude and separation from each other. The emaciated appearance of Giacometti's sculptures has been seen by some as an effort to render visually the precarious nature of the human condition in the modern age, while others have linked it to contemporary interest in phenomenology, reading it as a way of addressing the tension created by the physical and perceptual distance which separates artist, model and viewer. However, although Giacometti was involved at this time with Sartre and the Existentialist circle, he always reacted strongly to any attempt at imposing a literary or psychological reading on his works, stating that his only object of study was perception per se. By the time La foret was executed, Giacometti had attained wide-scale public recognition as one of the pivotal artists of his generation. In 1948 the influential dealer Pierre Matisse organized the first exhibition of Giacometti's work in his New York gallery, where in 1950 he was to show the present work. This work was purchased directly from Pierre Matisse and has remained in the same collection since. During the same year, Giacometti was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale, and the Kunsthalle in Basel held a retrospective of his work. The other five casts of this sculpture are located in the Fondation Maeght, St Paul de Vence; the Kunsthaus, Zurich; Louisiana Art Museum, Denmark; Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; and in a private collection. Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York Acquired by Reader's Digest in 1951 Exhibited: New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1950 New York, M. Knoedler and Co., Inc., Reader's Digest Collection, 1963, pp. 38-39 New York, Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, The Art Institute; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art, Alberto Giacometti, 1965, no. 36 New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1974, no. 59 New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Alberto Giacometti: Painting, Sculpture & Drawing, 1985 New York, Wildenstein & Co. (traveling exhibition), Selections from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1985-86, pp. 32-33 Mexico City, Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo, Giacometti, 1987, no. 33 Auckland City Art Gallery, The Reader's Digest Collection, 1989, pp. 38-39 Literature: Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue),The Arts Council Gallery, London, 1955, no. 22, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle, Bern 1956, no. 29, the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul catalogued Jacques Dupin and Ernst Scheidegger, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, p. 257, n.n., illustration of another cast Palma Bucarelli, Alberto Giacometti, Rome, 1962, pl. 44, illustration of another cast Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1965, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul, as frontispiece Willy Rotzler and Marianne Adelmann, Alberto Giacometti, Bern and Stuttgart, 1970, illustrated pl. 5 Carlo Huber, Alberto Giacometti, Zurich, 1970, p. 74, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul de Vence Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, no. 124 illustration of the cast in the Kunsthaus, Zurich Alberto Giacometti, (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Maeght, St Paul de Vence, 1978, p. 88, no. 57, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul de Vence H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 1978, no. 644, illustrated Alberto Giacometti, Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings (exhibition catalogue), Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery; 1981, p. 76, no. 17, illustration of another cast p. 29 Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Maeght, Barcelona, 1981-82, no. 9, the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St. Paul de Vence catalogued Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1984, p. 130, no. 184, illustration of another cast Charles Juliet, Giacometti, Paris, 1985 pp 71-2, illustration of another cast Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1986, p. 271, n. 108, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St Paul de Vence Herbert and Mercedes Matter, Giacometti, New York and Paris, 1988, pp. 76 & 84-7, illustrations of another cast Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 1988-89, p. 151, no. 67, illustration of the cast in the Fondation Maeght, St Paul de Vence Alberto Giacometti, dibujo, escultura, pintura(exhibition catalogue), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1990, p. 468, no. 205, illustration of the cast in the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, a Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, pp. 104 & 350, nos 96 & 324, illustrations of the cast in Kunsthaus, Zurich Tahar Ben Jelloun, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1991, p. 61, illustration of another cast Angela Schneider, (ed.), Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Munich and New York, 1994, no. 57, illustration of the cast in the Wilhelm Lehmbruck-Museum, Duisburg.