Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne
Private collection, since 1984
Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Alberto Giacometti: Dessins, November 1975-January 1976, no. 21, ill.
Chicago, Chicago Art Fair, Galerie Alice Pauli, Drawings and Watercolours, 19 – 24 May 1983, no. 22
Lausanne, Galerie Alice Pauli, Balthus, Giacometti, Bonnard: Dessins de collections, 17 May – 14 July 1984, no. 15, ill.
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art-Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Alberto Giacometti: sculptures-peintures-dessins, 28 June – 6 September 1992, no. 32, ill. p. 81
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art-Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Glancing at the Century, 28 June – 20 September 1998, pp. 100-103, ill. p. 102
In 1926 Alberto Giacometti was forced to settle in a tiny 23 square meter studio in the 14th district of Paris, from where he would never leave. The decision to stay there may not have been conscious, however, it proves Giacometti’s deep indifference to comfort and material things. It also reveals that the center of his life was his work, which made him forget all the practical compulsions of everyday life.
The sparing furniture in the studio will often serve as models, most often for drawings, and will treat them like his live models. In the Interior, emphasis is given to his own chair, stool and table placed under the window. It is impressive that Giacometti is absent from the drawing, since we understand that, in order to design this familiar furniture, he had exceptionally played the role of the model rather than his own. Thus, the Interior is a reference to his living space, which is certainly small, but obtains a completely different dimension, if we consider all the works created there.
Throughout his life Giacometti had an irrational bond with non-living things. In some of them he was seeing living creatures, while others again reminded him of death. The furniture and the window of the Interior should therefore not be seen as mere decorative elements, worked with the distance that characterizes the interior scenes, still life and landscapes generally. At the accumulation of the lines defining the contours of the objects, we can see Giacometti’s desire to fill the void that haunted him during that time of his life, which would lead him to create his first and so characteristic filamentous sculptures.
