Objets Mobiles et Muets (Moving, Mute Objects)

Alberto Giacometti

This is Giacometti's first lithograph, done in 1931, a Surrealist work with Giacometti composing a "poem" in prose to accompany his sketches of 7 of his Surrealist sculptures. This impression is from the edition of 30 published by the "Revue de surrealisme." A second, unsigned edition was published in 1951 by "XXe Siecle" in an edition of over 1000, folded into the publication.

A loose translation of the poem: "All things - further, all those which are past and others before which budge my girl friends - they change (one passes near them - they are far away) others approach, climb up, go down, the canoes on the water, there in space, go up, go down - I sleep here, the flowers of the rug, the water of the leaking faucet. / Someone is speaking in a room way off: two or three people - of what station? the locomotives which whistle, there is no station near here - one might throw orange peelings from the terrace top into the narrow and deep street, the night the mules bawled desparately, toward morning one slaughtered them, she approaches her head to my pillow."

'Objets Mobiles et Muets' was referenced in the Art Journal on 12/22/05 article titled "Perceptions at play: Giacometti through contemporary eyes." It reads: ….'"Objects of Symbolic Function,” a category Salvador Dali used to reference the sublimated impulses and desires elicited in the viewer by Giacometti's Suspended Ball in his pioneering article on Surrealist objects. The article was published in 1931 in Andre Breton's journal Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. In a double-page layout of the same issue, Giacometti published his own "Objets mobiles et muets" (Moving and Mute Objects), seven drawings framed by automatic prose. The dreamlike matter-of-factness of these images and their sexual aggression--note, for instance, the constrictive cage formats on the top register, the sadistic image of a stork's beak aiming at an eye-snake, and the phallic shapes of two "disagreeable objects" on the bottom left and right sides of the spread--intimate the increasingly dark and obsessively death-ridden mood of Giacometti's succeeding works."'