A MYTHICAL STUDIO

Immortalised by great photographers such as Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Sabine Weiss and Ernst Scheidegger, Alberto Giacometti's studio has become a symbol of post-war Parisian artistic life. Located in the Montparnasse district, that little space of 23 square metres, with rudimentary comfort, was used by the artist as a studio and a home from 1926.

Seated in the cold of the studio, those close to him accepted the exhausting task of posing while he painted or sculpted tirelessly.

Inseparable from Giacometti's myth, the studio is necessary to an understanding of his oeuvre. The ensemble of elements from the studio was kept by his widow Annette.

Today they belong in the collection of the Giacometti Foundation.

The studio recreated permanently in the Giacometti Institute re-unites a set of original works and some plaster casts kept by the artist, as well as the last works in clay on which he was working just prior to his death.

Some works, which are very fragile, had never been shown in public. The furniture and the original walls covered in drawings complete the reconstruction of that mythical place.

Alberto Giacometti

Notes and Sketches, c. 1922-1926

pencil on notebook page

I was walking on the boulevard, there were

oval, pale face. She walked past me. I followed her. She stopped. I greeted her, she replied. We walked.

She held her thigh covered in black silk next to my leg but with a space in between.

We entered a place, she lived there. A big room tastefully arranged.

She looked at me, and smiled. Stay for dinner, she said. I stayed.

A young girl entered.

My daughter.

1 greeted her, she held out her hand.

Big light blue eyes; a half-opened mouth, pink, and dark hair, much, a mass of hair. Not tall or small, slim. A little child's dress. Svelte.

We ate, we chatted. They were kind-hearted. She drank a coffee.

Go to bed, the mother said. She greeted me again, smiled, looked at me kindly, and left after kissing the lady.

We stayed alone. We looked at each other. We trembled. We lowered our eyes. Endless scene. I remained there. I could imagine the full shapes that swung at the front, breasts, shoulders, belly and thighs. She felt my gaze and trembled. Then she looked at me and made a sign with her head, from the top down.

I came closer. I laid her on the sofa. We went to bed, I (undecipherable word) her

In 1933, Giacometti made this sculpture of a mother holding her daughter's hand from the memory of a dream transcribed in a notebook dating from the 1920s. This representation associates the naturalist figure of the young girl with the more stylised of the mother already present in the painting The Palace at 4.a.m. made the previous year.

This projection of a mother and her child conceals a much more sordid reality that he described in his text Hier, sables mouvants: 'After having torn their dresses, I raped two women, one was thirty-two, all in black, her face like alabaster, the other, her daughter, on whom white veils floated. The whole forest resounded with their cries and moans. I killed them too, but very slowly [...] each time with slight variations [...] and, satisfied, I fell asleep.