Lot Essay
Giacometti painted the present portrait of his brother Diego in 1957, seven years after he painted Diego assis dans l'atelier, lot 17 in the present sale. Although the subject of the two works is the same, their execution is dramatically different, the vigorous brushstrokes which characterized the earlier painting transformed here into a soft gray miasma. "As I worked," Giacometti recalled in a 1958 interview, "...one color after the other dropped out, and what remained? Gray! Gray! Gray!" In the catalogue of the 1974 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Reinhold Hohl further explained the shift in Giacometti's style which took place in the mid-1950's:
Giacometti now painted figures as apparitions rather than as
reflections of reality. He treated the canvas as if it were a
magician's cloth, painting it with nebulous, incorporeal grays
ranging from dark to light shades. Heads or figures, delineated
with a few black, gray and white strokes, appeared like unexpected
magical phenomena out of the center of ambiguous backgrounds...
Giacometti's goal was not to create ever greater physical likenesses in his portraits, but to spontaneously create the apparition again
and again, until it resembled, as nearly as possible, the living
presence, perceived at one glance, of the model. Giacometti's credo was: "I am not attempting likeness but resemblance." (exh. cat.,
Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1974, p. 37)
The stylistic change in Giacometti's oils which Hohl describes has been attributed to an aesthetic crisis which the artist experienced in September of 1956, while painting his first of at least twelve portraits of a visiting Japanese professor of existentialist philosophy named Isaku Yanaihara. Unable to capture Yanaihara's likeness on canvas, Giacometti began to rework his composition compulsively, producing the undefined gray void which recurs in works like the present one. According to Valerie Fletcher, Giacometti actually began Buste de Diego as a portrait of Yanaihara, later painting a slightly larger image of Diego over the original image of the professor. Yanaihara's head and shoulders are still slightly visible within Diego's torso, a ghost-like remnant of the painting's first state.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who met Yanaihara during the latter's visit to Paris, interpreted Giacometti's late portraits as struggles between being and nothingness, commenting, "[Giacometti] would like us to see the seated [figure] he has just painted through layers of emptiness... Nothing enfolds him, nothing supports him, nothing contains him: he appears, isolated in the immense frame of the void." (exh. cat., Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 51) Struggling against formlessness, Giacometti's subjects take on a compelling, almost heroic, air of mystery in late portraits like Buste de Diego. As Hohl concludes,
Giacometti's late paintings are among the masterpieces of modern
art, for in them are combined the qualities of all great painting:
the abstract beauty of painterly means, unceasing intensity of
execution, and, above all, the inexhaustible spirituality of the
subject. (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1974, p. 38)
Giacometti now painted figures as apparitions rather than as
reflections of reality. He treated the canvas as if it were a
magician's cloth, painting it with nebulous, incorporeal grays
ranging from dark to light shades. Heads or figures, delineated
with a few black, gray and white strokes, appeared like unexpected
magical phenomena out of the center of ambiguous backgrounds...
Giacometti's goal was not to create ever greater physical likenesses in his portraits, but to spontaneously create the apparition again
and again, until it resembled, as nearly as possible, the living
presence, perceived at one glance, of the model. Giacometti's credo was: "I am not attempting likeness but resemblance." (exh. cat.,
Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1974, p. 37)
The stylistic change in Giacometti's oils which Hohl describes has been attributed to an aesthetic crisis which the artist experienced in September of 1956, while painting his first of at least twelve portraits of a visiting Japanese professor of existentialist philosophy named Isaku Yanaihara. Unable to capture Yanaihara's likeness on canvas, Giacometti began to rework his composition compulsively, producing the undefined gray void which recurs in works like the present one. According to Valerie Fletcher, Giacometti actually began Buste de Diego as a portrait of Yanaihara, later painting a slightly larger image of Diego over the original image of the professor. Yanaihara's head and shoulders are still slightly visible within Diego's torso, a ghost-like remnant of the painting's first state.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who met Yanaihara during the latter's visit to Paris, interpreted Giacometti's late portraits as struggles between being and nothingness, commenting, "[Giacometti] would like us to see the seated [figure] he has just painted through layers of emptiness... Nothing enfolds him, nothing supports him, nothing contains him: he appears, isolated in the immense frame of the void." (exh. cat., Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 51) Struggling against formlessness, Giacometti's subjects take on a compelling, almost heroic, air of mystery in late portraits like Buste de Diego. As Hohl concludes,
Giacometti's late paintings are among the masterpieces of modern
art, for in them are combined the qualities of all great painting:
the abstract beauty of painterly means, unceasing intensity of
execution, and, above all, the inexhaustible spirituality of the
subject. (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1974, p. 38)