Alberto Giacometti

Galerie Le Bateau-Lavoir, Paris

Acquired from the above by the late owner in January 1969

Venice, Biennale di Venezia, 1962

Zürich, Kunsthalle, Giacometti, 1962, no. 87, another cast listed

Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1961, no. 7, another cast listed

 

The bronze has a rich and varied brown patina. There is some slight surface dirt in the crevices. Otherwise, this work is in excellent original condition.
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Buste de Diego is one of Alberto Giacometti's grand sculptural portraits of his younger brother Diego, who was the artist's primary model throughout the 1950s and 1960s (see fig. 1).  These portraits of Diego indicate the intensely close relationship that the two men shared, and Alberto's familiarity with his subject undoubtedly aided in the artistic freedom with which he could approach his work.  The Giacometti brothers collaborated for much of their professional lives, and their reliance upon each other's creative support is well known.  As was the case for most of his sculptures, Alberto conceived the model in clay on the armature and Diego assisted with the bronze casting.  By the time he created this work, Alberto already had attracted significant critical recognition and had secured a contract with the prestigious Galerie Maeght in Paris.  Diego, on the other hand, had only just begun to design the bronze furniture that would make him famous in his own right.   Although Alberto always encouraged his brother to develop his artistic talent, he also recognized that Diego was indispensable to the production of the innovated sculptures. The brothers' relationship was characterized by a mutual loyalty and respect that ultimately helped each man make the most of his talent.   Annette Arm accounted for this when discussing her husband Alberto in 1952, "He remains always his same anxious self, but fortunately, he has a brother who is more calm and understands him well" (quoted in James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography, New York, 1983, p. 329).

These likenesses of Diego marked a major shift in Giacometti's approach to his sculpture.  In contrast to the elongated figures of his post-war years, these figural sculptures from the late 1950s and 1960s were more naturalistic in scale and more emphatically focused on the nuances of the sitter's face.  Most of these works were heads and half-length busts, often conceived from memory (see fig. 2).  This method of execution accounts for fact that most of Giacometti's busts of Diego completed between 1951 and 1957 look more like Alberto than his brother.  But beginning in 1958 onwards, the heads take on more of the features of Diego, with his smooth, balding head and deeply recessed eyes.  The later sculptures are executed with the matière pétrie, or kneaded method, that heightened the expressiveness of the figure. As with the present work, Giacometti enhances the realism of these faces by precisely incising the figures with a knife.  But his restless hands, constantly pinching, smoothing and remodeling the surface, are his primary tools.

The present sculpture bears a striking similarity to the paintings that Giacometti would render of his brother in the 1960s (see fig. 3).  Diego appears to be staring into the distance, as if entranced by a memory or the contemplation of a future event.  We see this tendency also in other sculptural portraits of Diego, Annette and Lotar that Giacometti created in the 1960s and up until his death in 1965.  Valerie J. Fletcher tells us that the prominent eyes of these figures relate to Egyptian images from Faiyûm, which Giacometti kept pinned to the walls of his studio.  It is as if Diego's face, as Fletcher writes, "represents the human psyche, apparently prey to an indefinable, but frightening emotion." (Valerie J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti,1901-1989 (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1988-89).  Indeed, this powerful sculpture, created during the final years of the artist's life, seems to capture a particular sentiment that the artist once expressed in a Surrealist prose poem: "The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways." (quoted in ibid., 37).