Silences

After creating his well-known figures of slender, solitary men and women. Alberto Giacometti takes up “compositions” in the early 1950’s. The Forest, whose pedestal holds seven female figures, emaciated, hieratic, and frontal, positioned at unequal distances one from the other, is one of such compositions. The group is completed by a man’s bust inserted in the background on the composition’s right side. This addition prefigures a growing interest the artist had for face and bust motifs throughout the next decade, both in painting and in sculpture. The work’s title, as indicated by the artist evokes a childhood memory: “the composition Seven figures and a head, reminds me of a place in the forest back in my youth, when the trees (…) seemed to be petrified characters conversing together.”

The Forest, 1950
57 x 61 x 49.5 cm; bronze (Susse Foundry, Arcueil)
Copy of the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation, Saint-Paul - France

© ADAGP/Fondation Giacometti, Paris (2009)

Stampa, Grisons, Switzerland, 1901 – Coire, Switzerland, 1966