Spaightwood Galleries

Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966), "Man Walking" in the Studio (Lust 94). Original lithograph, 1951. Published in the deluxe art review, Derrière le Miroir. Edition unknown (c. 1000 impressions signed in the stone; there are no pencil-signed impressions.) With the usual centerfold. The browning is only in the photograph; all images are on uniformly white paper. Image size: 380x560mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Herbert Lust's catalogue of Giacometti's original prints lists 353 items, more than half of which were done for books and special issues of deluxe art reviews; several more have been added to a recent reissue of that catalogue. A new catalogue raisonné is about to appear to accompany a complete retrospective of Giacometti's prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (November 2007). There is a general consensus that three of his very greatest lithographs were published in the 1951 issue of the deluxe art review Derriere le Miroir dedicated to his work. Lust describes his reaction to seeing these works in Giacometti's studio:

Entering Giacometti's studio [in the spring of 1951], which was filled with his finest sculptures, I found the artist peering at some sheets crammed with violent black slashes. The sheet in his hand made me catch my breath. It was a lithograph of the studio [Lust 94] with the statue of the Man Walking cutting across the center. It hit me like a bomb, like a wild primeval explosion in the earth. It was one of the most dramatic works I had ever seen in black and white.

The lithograph turned out to be the centerpiece for the catalogue of the Maeght show, the finest Alberto was ever to have, and one that embraced almost all of his great statues. . . . The catalogue for the show was a text by that austere poet Michel Leiris . . . illustrated by three lithographs [Lust 92-94] by Alberto. Thus, it was at the very height of his creative surge, with all his abilities straining at full stream, with his talents turning more and more toward painting, that Giacometti did his first great lithographs, those at which he was peering that spring day.

Little wonder that, given the fevered circumstances and the ideal situation, Alberto never surpassed these particular lithographs, though in 1954 he equaled them. These first drawings on stone represent the collision of his mature sculptural style with his newly discovered mastery of painting. These four lithographs [including the poster for the show] concern the studio and portray: a group of standing statues and busts with the catalogue's title printed at the top and bottom (93); his wife, sculptures of a horse and other subjects (92); a panoramic view of the studio with the Man Walking in the center (94). (Lust 73-74)

Lust prized these lithographs because he loved Giacometti's sculptures, which even them were beyond the reach of all but the wealthy. As he says to the artist, "Everything you have ever done as an artist is in them. One gets the same feeling from these lithographs as from the actual bronzes" (p. 74). Lust goes on to suggest that "Giacometti looked upon his bronzes as suprahumans. And since in 1951 and 1954 he became an audience to his studio, stood in wonder before his bronzes, at times perhaps not believing he had created them, he became, as he recorded them for history, rather like the chorus in a Greek play in which his statues were the players. For Lust, the wonder of Giacometti's studio lithographs is that "never has a cycle of prints by a major artist been so austere and stark, so devoid of charm and seductions. Giacometti had focused all his efforts on the severe stark architecture of his heart." In these works, Lust concludes, he gives us "the black ecstasy of an imagination that is its own prison" (75).

Chiara Negri, "Giacometti Lithographer and Etcher," singles out the three lithographs for the 1951 Derriere le Miroir and three of the 1954 Studio lithographs (including Annette in the Studio [Lust 10]) as the best examples of his lithographs, "the very keystone of Giacometti's entire output" (2): "All show the studio, cluttered with sculptures, paintings, stools, trestles, chairs and all the tools and tackle of a sculptor. All three [of the 1951 Derriere le Miroir lithographs] include a figure (either a person . . . of a sculpture in the center of the sheet, the pivot of the whole composition. The significance of "Annette" goes beyond the figures merely formal function (as a balancing element for the whole scene). She . . . is above all else a symbol of the relationship between the artist and his art, i.e. his own works. Giacometti went on to produce an enormous number of other lithographs, possibly technically more successful, but never showing with more clarity the value of graphics as a means of reflection on his own activity, and therefore on his own existence" (11).