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Lot Essay
Throughout his prolific lifetime, Alberto Giacometti modeled 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 artist'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 modeled in 1965. Giacometti scholar Valerie Fletcher said of the portraits from this period:
In 1965 Giacometti modeled several busts of Diego and the photographer Elie Lotar. Compulsively revising them from the models and from memory over weeks and months. Giacometti considered them works in progress with no absolute state; each permutation was an important as the others. These busts from the last months of Giacometti's life have particularly intense gazes and gouged surfaces. Natural shapes are distorted: the heads just forward with little solidity in back; the cheeks are more concave than rounded, the torsos are stylized into abstract shapes . . . The distortions emphasize the noncorporeal, expressive nature of these portraits. Although Giacometti denied any deliberate emotionalism in his art, his rejection of descriptive normalcy in these busts creates a sense of yearning and subdued anguish (V. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 234).
The present work is from a group of powerful bronze portraits modeled in 1965. Giacometti scholar Valerie Fletcher said of the portraits from this period:
In 1965 Giacometti modeled several busts of Diego and the photographer Elie Lotar. Compulsively revising them from the models and from memory over weeks and months. Giacometti considered them works in progress with no absolute state; each permutation was an important as the others. These busts from the last months of Giacometti's life have particularly intense gazes and gouged surfaces. Natural shapes are distorted: the heads just forward with little solidity in back; the cheeks are more concave than rounded, the torsos are stylized into abstract shapes . . . The distortions emphasize the noncorporeal, expressive nature of these portraits. Although Giacometti denied any deliberate emotionalism in his art, his rejection of descriptive normalcy in these busts creates a sense of yearning and subdued anguish (V. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 234).