Alberto Giacometti

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner's grand-mother circa 1945-1950

Private collection, France

L. P. Guigues, « Magie de la Lumière », Art et Industrie, April 1946, p. 34

Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier, Jean-Michel Frank, l'étrange luxe du rien, Paris, 2006, p. 347

Giacometti : une famille de créateurs, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 3 July – 14 November 2021, p. 192

This lot is sold with a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Giacometti and is recorded in the database of the Fondation Giacometti, the Alberto Giacometti Database, under the number AGD 4647.

Among the floor lamps Alberto Giacometti designed for Jean-Michel Frank in the 1930s, the Osselet model, created around 1936, is one of the most enigmatic. Its clean lines, the absence of motifs understandable at first glance, the choice of patinated bronze and the tripod base evoke an ancient civilization, awakening our imagination. When night falls, the floor lamp becomes a mysterious silhouette, seemingly from another continent and a distant era. And although the title chosen by Giacometti, Osselet, evokes a tangible reality, the re-appropriation of this singular element, ancestor of the dice in antiquity, anchors this luminaire in the artist's surrealist work.

©Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris, 2024