The highlight of the auctions to be held during Art Basel Paris, Avant-Garde (s) Include Thinking Italian, will feature an important work: Envelopes on the saddle of the atelier di Alberto Giacometti. Painted in 1964, this painting was created by Alberto Giacometti when he was at the height of his artistic potential – in the last years of his life, when he placed painting on the same level as sculpture. The work, which subsequently belonged to Pierre Matisse and Ernst Beyeler, has one of the most significant provenances in the history of 20th century art.
Buste sur la selle de l'atelier is put up for sale for an estimate of between 2 and 3 million euros
Buste sur la selle de l'atelier is awork of exceptional provenance. The fact that it passed from the collections of Pierre Matisse to those of Ernst Beyeler is proof enough of this. In addition to being key figures in the art of the century, those two men are exceptional connoisseurs of a body of work that they championed, sometimes decisively. Pierre Matisse, who hosted Giacometti's first solo exhibition in New York in 1948, played a key role in his career. Alberto Giacometti's long letter addressed to him, reproduced in full in the MoMA exhibition catalogue, attests to the depth of the dialogue between them. Ernst Beyeler, a fervent admirer of Alberto Giacometti, plays a key role in the creation of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich. More than 350 works pass through his gallery in Basel and around 15 of the most important become part of the collection of the Fondation Beyeler. In 2007, when the foundation celebrates its tenth anniversary with a special exhibition, Buste sur la selle de l'atelier is one of the works selected for the exhibition.
After the war, Alberto Giacometti created some of his best-known works
Returning to Paris, he exhibited in America and had access to all the resources necessary to produce the casts he desired. His work therefore receives unprecedented recognition. In January 1964 he was awarded the International Painting Prize by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. On 28 July of the same year, the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght inaugurated the courtyard and the hall that bear his name. The following year, three retrospectives earned him worldwide recognition: at the Tate in London, at the MoMA in New York and at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. Although Alberto Giacometti is celebrated as one of the greatest sculptors of the 60th century, the 1964s were also a period in which he considered painting on par with sculpture and produced a body of work with no aesthetic equivalent in modern art. Finally, XNUMX is the year in which Eli Lotar – Giacometti's last male model – began posing for his busts. Buste sur la selle de l'atelier represents one of these busts nearing completion and is emblematic of the final years of Alberto Giacometti's artistic career.
