13 Photographs

Published in Hamden, Connecticut by Ives-Sillman in 1978, this is the prospectus booklet for Herbert Matter’s portfolio 13 Photographs, devoted entirely to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

The thirteen plates comprise a portrait of Giacometti and twelve photographs of his sculpture, drawn from the body of work Matter began in 1960 on his first visit to the artist’s Paris studio. Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter (1907–1984) met Giacometti through Pierre Matisse in 1950 and was commissioned to photograph and design the Guggenheim’s 1955 Giacometti catalogue. Giacometti was astonished by the resulting images, writing that each was “a creation in itself” and that they revealed aspects of his sculpture he had never seen.

The portfolio carries texts by the painter and critic Louis Finkelstein and the photographer Baldwin Lee, who taught alongside Matter at Yale. The publication holds particular significance as the final edition issued by Ives-Sillman, the New Haven imprint of graphic designers Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman, appearing in 1978 shortly after Ives’s death. Matter’s two-decade Giacometti project was ultimately gathered in the monograph Giacometti (Abrams, 1987), completed after his own death in 1984.