all Solo exhibition

2025

PARIS SANS FIN - Lithographies originale de Alberto Giacometti. 2018 bis 2019

PARIS SANS FIN - Lithographies originale de Alberto Giacometti. 2018 bis 2019

PARIS SANS FIN – Original Lithographs by Alberto Giacometti. 2018 to 2019 “Paris sans fin” by Alberto Giacometti – a homage to the city of cities, presented in 150 lithographs. This portfolio, comprising 150 individual sheets, is considered both the legacy and the culmination of his graphic work. “Paris sans fin” depicts the places and people that were important to the artist. In 1969, three years after Giacometti’s death, his friend, the publisher Tériade, released this work. By the late 1950s, Alberto Giacometti was already a famous and wealthy artist, yet he never changed his modest habits or expectations. In the Café-Tabac Le Gaulois, he would have a simple meal in the early afternoon, and in the evening a table was reserved for him at La Coupole. Otherwise, he rarely moved beyond his familiar surroundings in Paris. That changed in 1958, when Giacometti met Caroline, a twenty-year-old prostitute who became his lover and model. He bought her a red MG, and while she drove through Paris, he sat beside her sketching his city — his “Paris sans fin.”

Involved Artists:

Alberto Giacometti (CH)

The Project

PARIS SANS FIN

Lithographies originale de Alberto Giacometti

Collection Carlos Gross, curated by Klaus Littmann, Littmann Kulturprojekte

“Paris sans fin” by Alberto Giacometti –
A homage to the city of cities in 150 lithographs

With Caroline, Alberto Giacometti races through the nights of Paris. She drives the sports car he gave her as a gift. He had paid the car dealer in cash, to the astonishment of everyone who heard about it. Giacometti had simply pulled a thick wad of banknotes from his jacket and placed it on the table. And now this woman — a 21-year-old prostitute whose real name was Yvonne-Marguerite Poiraudeau — drives her red MG through Paris.

Giacometti (1901–1966), who first met the nearly forty years younger Caroline in a bar in 1958, sits in the passenger seat. And, as the French writer Franck Maubert wrote in his wonderfully intimate 2012 portrait of Caroline, he is “excited, scanning the sidewalks for the girls. His eyes dart back and forth; he asks her to stop, and Caroline parks the car halfway up on the curb. With pen in hand, Alberto feverishly sketches the façades of buildings opening toward the sky. His hand surrenders to the page; no one can stop him. It was as if he were seized by a trance.”

In the early 1950s, Giacometti wrote in one of his notebooks about the impossibility of writing about sexual fantasies that reached far back into his childhood and his twenties. Under the title “Incapable d’écrire le livre pour Tériade” (“Unable to Write the Book for Tériade”), he describes the nights he spent wandering through Paris — prowling in search of a prostitute. “Other women did not exist for me at that time,” he wrote. He wanted to see them all, to know them all, and every night he set out once more on the hunt.

The trauma of failure, inscribed in so many of Giacometti’s paintings and sculptures, also haunts “Paris sans fin”, which, more than any other of his works, was a long and difficult birth. He signed the contract with Tériade — the Greek-born art critic and friend who had become a well-known publisher in Paris — in May 1959. The book, comprising 150 captivating drawings, was finally published ten years later, three years after Giacometti’s death, in an edition of 250 copies.

“Paris sans fin” is streets upon streets, buildings and churches, the girls of Chez Adrien — the bar he frequented — Giacometti’s studio and his women: Annette, Caroline, Isabel. But also Diego, his brother, and Tériade, who had originally inspired the idea for such a book. And there is a text that, fittingly for Giacometti the doubter, recounts how he selected, rejected, and reselected the lithographs — and how he failed in his attempt to write the fifteen pages planned for the book. In the end, there were only nine, and even those had to be set in oversized type.

The true essence of the book — which one can never leaf through often enough — lies in the images that unfold Giacometti’s Paris before our eyes like a film. They introduce a narrative dimension into his work unlike anything else he ever created. Yet this narrative reflects the spirit of the time: it is not a linear story but rather a montage — Giacometti was, after all, a great lover of cinema — of diary-like impressions, of snapshots drawn mostly on site, with the lithographic pencil, each line needing to be precise.

But what does “precision” mean for this artist, who, more than any other, externalized his search for the right expression onto paper or lithographic stone? He draws line after line, circling his subject with ever-new strokes. It is as if one line that failed to capture the object — or the sensation the object evoked in the artist’s eye — must be corrected by another. Yet this correction never erases the first line; it remains, equally valid, because what the artist seeks lies in between, in approximation, in the uncertain.

Thus, the Paris views in “Paris sans fin” convey something feverish or shivering. The intimate nude drawings of his lovers are charged with intensity; the café scenes have a dreamlike quality; and the street scenes — drawn in Paris and along the road to Orly, as if taken from a film — capture the speed of the red MG in which his lover Caroline sped through the city. Indeed, one might call Caroline the great enabler of this book — the true catalyst who untied the knot Giacometti described when recalling the sexual phantasmagorias of his youth and his breathless nights wandering in search of a prostitute.

Christoph Heim, May 2018

Exhibition premiere: May 9 – June 29, 2018
Venue: CENTRAL STATION, Sternengasse 19, 1st Basement Level, Basel

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Publications

PARIS SANS FIN Alberto Giacometti – eine Hommage an die Stadt der Städte

PARIS SANS FIN Alberto Giacometti – eine Hommage an die Stadt der Städte

DE / EN / IT
Time of publication: 2018
Hardcover, 150 Seiten
CHF 35.00
ISBN: 978-3-7245-2317-8

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