Fondation Giacometti

Diego, Alberto’s younger brother by one year, was one of the artist’s main models right from his first portraits. At the end of the Twenties, he abandoned a painter’s career to become a designer, and especially to assist Alberto in the technical aspects of his work. He took charge of the preparation of the armatures for the sculptures, the casting of the plasters and the fusion of the bronzes. Due to his extraordinary availability, to his constant presence in the studio, Diego was the ideal model. He sat for his brother for countless busts, heads and paintings from the Twenties till the Sixties. Diego’s features were so often copied by Giacometti that they reappeared, almost automatically, in the numerous works the artist made from memory. In several paintings from the Fifties, Diego is depicted sitting in the studio, surrounded by the furniture and work tools, in tones still quite luminous. On the opposite, this painting seems to mark a passage to the later paintings, the numerous frontal bust portraits of Diego that Giacometti made in dark grey tones, which echo the expressive busts sculpted at the same period. In the middle of the painting, the face emerges from an obscure and indeterminate background, in which the studio is not at all recognizable. The work of the painter concentrates on the small head: while the rest of the bust is almost diluted in the background, it is the head that is the most detailed, even though it only occupies a small portion of the canvas. Close, in that sense, to the “black heads” made in the Fifties and beginning of the Sixties, this painting does not seem however to have been painted from memory, neither could it be considered simply a study of a head, given the resemblance to the model. Even if with a few strokes, Diego’s physiognomy is easily recognizable, in particular in the volumes of the forehead, chin and nose which assume specific evidence: “As long as the nose is not right,” Giacometti said to Yanaihara at the end of the Fifties, “all the rest is wrong. One needs to paint first the tip of the nose to paint a head.” Signed and dated, this painting was exhibited in 1958 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.

Signed and dated with a paintbrush at the bottom right corner "Alberto Giacometti 1958"

Pierre Matisse Gallery
Private collection
Sale Christie's New York, NY, May 4th, 2005, lot n ° 36
Sale Sotheby's New York, NY (United States Of America), November 3rd, 2008, lot n ° 32

1958 Giacometti : Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings from 1956 to 1958, New York, NY (United States Of America), Pierre Matisse Gallery, from 6th to May 31st 1958
2010 Crossing the Channel. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacometti, London (United Kingdom), Gagosian Gallery, from June 1st to July 31st 2010

Jacques DUPIN, Alberto Giacometti, Paris : Maeght éditeur, Paris, 1962, ill. p. 164
Yves BONNEFOY, Alberto Giacometti. Biographie d'une oeuvre, Paris : Flammarion, 1991, cat. no. 411, p. 426, ill. p. 429
Impressionist and Modern Art. Evening Sale, New York, NY : Christie's, 2005, lot no. 36, p. 126, ill. p. 127
Impressionist & Modern Art. Evening Sale, New York, NY : Sotheby's, 2008, lot no. 32, p. 122-123, ill. p. 123
Pilar ORDOVAS, Crossing the Channel. Friendship and Connections in Paris and London 1946-1965, New York, NY : Gagosian Gallery, 2010, p. 82 & 85, ill. p. 57 & 85
Yves BONNEFOY, Alberto Giacometti. Biographie d'une oeuvre, Paris : Flammarion, 2012, cat. no. 411, p. 426, ill. p. 429