Lot Essay
Throughout his prolific lifetime, Alberto Giacometti executed numerous busts and heads of his younger brother Diego, who became his assistant and partner in 1929. They shared a small studio at 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron in an artisan's quarter in Paris. Diego worked with Alberto preparing armatures, making plaster casts, arranging the casting of his bronzes, and working patinas. He also served as one of Alberto's principal models, posing for the sculptor countless times over the course of several decades.
The present work is from a group of powerful bronze portraits of Diego executed in the 1950s. Giacometti scholar Yves Bonnefoy says of the portraits from this period:
These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person, meeting his eyes and thereby understanding the compression, the narrowing that Giacometti imposed on the chin or the nose or the general shape of the skull. This was the period when Giacometti was most strongly conscious of the fact that the inside of the plaster or clay mass which he modelled was something inert, undifferentiated, nocturnal, that it betrays the life he sought to represent, and that he must therefore strive to eliminate this purely spatial dimension by constricting the material to fit the most prominent characteristics of the face. This is exactly what he achieves with amazing vigour when, occasionally, he gave Diego's face a blade-like narrowness--drawing seems to have eliminated the plaster, the head has escaped from space-- and demands therefore that the spectator stand in front of the sculpture as he did himself, disregarding the back and sides of his model and as bound to a face-to-face relationship as in the case of work at an easel (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, pp. 432 and 436).
The present work is from a group of powerful bronze portraits of Diego executed in the 1950s. Giacometti scholar Yves Bonnefoy says of the portraits from this period:
These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person, meeting his eyes and thereby understanding the compression, the narrowing that Giacometti imposed on the chin or the nose or the general shape of the skull. This was the period when Giacometti was most strongly conscious of the fact that the inside of the plaster or clay mass which he modelled was something inert, undifferentiated, nocturnal, that it betrays the life he sought to represent, and that he must therefore strive to eliminate this purely spatial dimension by constricting the material to fit the most prominent characteristics of the face. This is exactly what he achieves with amazing vigour when, occasionally, he gave Diego's face a blade-like narrowness--drawing seems to have eliminated the plaster, the head has escaped from space-- and demands therefore that the spectator stand in front of the sculpture as he did himself, disregarding the back and sides of his model and as bound to a face-to-face relationship as in the case of work at an easel (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, pp. 432 and 436).