Augusto Giacometti (1877−1947)

A grey strip denoting an area of rock extends along the bottom edge of the painting (which was preceded by two small pastel studies) and rises on the right to fill the corner. On it are seated two figures who, seen from behind and flanked by olive-green plants, draw the viewer into the sublime natural spectacle taking place before their eyes – a motif derived from German Romantic art. They are gazing in apparent stillness at the rainbow overarching the scene, marvelling at this passing natural phenomenon. The great distance between them and the rainbow gives the space a cosmic dimension. Colour is at its most intense in the prism of the rainbow: apart from blue and green in the figures and plants, the rest of the painting – not least the ‘empty’ expanse in the middle – is bathed in a grey suggestive of mist and haze. For Augusto Giacometti, the rainbow motif, whose associations range from classical mythology and Christian iconography to Romantic notions of natural beauty and transience, embodied a quest for harmony between God and the cosmos. Seen thus, the rainbow also symbolises peace. Forming a ‘bridge between humanity and God or between the worldly and the otherworldly’,2 it signifies ‘a harmonious world […] of pantheistic belief in nature’.

Regenbogen differs by reason of its subject matter from other works produced by Giacometti from 1910 to 1918. Interrupting his sequence of portraits, landscapes and chromatic fantasies (represented in the Kunstmuseum Bern’s collection by Fantasie in Grün [Fantasy in Green] of 1911), he returned here to the kind of Symbolist subject that had preoccupied him in Florence from 1903 to 1911. Remarkably, he did so in 1916, just one year before he made contact with the Zürich Dadaists and only two years before he embraced non-representational painting [...].

Source: Masterpieces Kunstmuseum Bern, Ed. Matthias Frehner / Valentina Locatelli, München: Hirmer Publishers, 2016, Cat. No 104, p. 144 (author: Beat Stutzer)