Alberto Giacometti

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Ruth & Harvey Kaplan (acquired from the above on December 29, 1959 and sold: Christie's, New York, May 4, 2005, lot 36)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

 

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings from 1956-1958, 1958

Jacques Dupin & Ernst Scheidegger, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, illustrated p. 164 (titled Tête and measuring 61 by 50 cm)

Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, no. 411, illustrated p. 429 (titled Head and measuring 61 by 50 cm)

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under UV. This work is in excellent original condition. Colors: Overall, the gray is lighter with more white undertones than it appears in the catalogue illustration.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The intense relationship between Alberto Giacometti and his brother Diego manifested itself in the artist's most psychologically compelling works of the 1950s and 1960s.   In his oil portraits in particular, there appears a raw and unapologetic candor that is not seen in his depictions of other models from this era.   Diego is stripped bare of any pretense in these pictures as he stares into oblivion for time eternal.   Sometimes the artist took even more confrontational pictorial measures to convey a very palpable sense of isolation and vulnerability.  In this portrait from 1958, for example, Diego's harrowing visage emerges from the darkness in the form of a tangled mass of black lines.  His features take shape in a frenzy of overlapping strokes, which have been scratched away around the hollows of the eyes to expose lighter-colored layers of paint.  Against the gray background this ghostly head appears all but disembodied, save for the simple outline of his shoulders and the faint red color washes that highlight his jacket.  This startling Tête de Diego, as so many of Giacometti's pictures of his brother are simply titled, is the personification of Giacometti's existential dilemma.

Giacometti completed the present portrait of Diego while emerging from what are considered his 'crisis' years (1956-57), when he worked on several commissioned portraits of the Japanese philosophy professor Isaku Yanaihara (fig. 2).  With the Yanaihara portraits, Giacometti struggled with the visual confrontation between viewer and subject and eliminated all perspectival references from his compositions.  When he turned to this portrait of Diego in 1958, he focused his attention on the singular image of the face.   Giacometti's aesthetic accomplishment here would inspire a later series of portraits in 1961 know as the Black Heads (fig. 3), and Yves Bonnefoy has even suggested that this very picture "belongs to that next and final phase" (Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., p. 426).

Giacometti's late portraits of Diego were all inextricably linked to the artist's confirmation of his own mortality and the personal turmoil that clouded his life during his final years.  His younger brother's image, which was closest to his own (fig. 1), was a conduit for expressing his anxiety surrounding these issues.   During the final years of his life these portraits of Diego became, according to Valerie Fletcher, "a vehicle for Alberto's intuition of the human psyche, prey to an indefinable and frightening emotion, perhaps apprehensive of an inevitable and increasingly imminent death" (V. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti (ex. cat.), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 30).

Completed during the first few months of 1958, this picture was first exhibited in May of that same year at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York (fig. 4).  Giacometti had rescheduled the exhibition three times -- from December to March to April to May -- fearing that he would not complete his paintings in time for the opening.  In one frantic letter to his dealer that February, Giacometti assured Matisse he was trying his best to complete all his canvases but feared that the exhibition would be a 'catastrophe.'  Matisse tried to reassure him, telling him to just finish up and send the pictures.   When they finally arrived in late March, Matisse congratulated Giacometti, writing on March 24, "The paintings have arrived and they look different than in your studio.  I am slowly adapting to them.  I like them more and more."  Although Matisse did not publish a catalogue for this exhibition, we know from the checklist that this important show included the present picture, several bronze busts of Diego, as well as nine Femmes de Venise.  It turned out to be one of Giacometti's most important one-man shows in the United States, attracting the attention of several buyers including Joseph Hirshhorn and Igor Stravinsky.