阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂 | 《迪亞哥頭像》

馬格畫廊，巴黎
漢諾威畫廊（艾麗卡·包森），倫敦（1958年購自上述畫廊）
丹勞·奧登-史迪瓦夫人（艾拉·溫特），倫敦（1958年6月25日購自上述畫廊）
艾麗卡·包森，倫敦及蘇黎世
私人收藏，英國（1970年代購自上述藏家）
勒菲弗畫廊（亞歷克斯·雷伊德與勒菲弗有限公司），倫敦
私人收藏，英國（1980年代購自上述藏家）
勒菲弗美術公司，倫敦
現藏家在2014年11月購自上述畫廊

倫敦，漢諾威畫廊，〈賈柯梅蒂、馬里尼、馬蒂斯、摩爾〉，1958年，品號7，圖錄載圖

阿姆斯特丹，市立博物館，〈艾拉·溫特收藏〉，1961-62年，圖錄載圖

倫敦，泰特藝術館，〈阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂：雕塑、油畫、素描 1913-65年〉，1965年，品號59（題為《迪亞哥頭像》並紀年1955）

雅克·杜龐，《阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂》，巴黎，1962年，279頁載石膏版本圖片（題為《頭部》並紀年1957）

大衛·史維斯塔，《觀看賈柯梅蒂》，倫敦，1994年，77-79頁載藝術家工作室拍攝的陶土版本圖片

恩斯特·謝德格，《阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂：石膏雕塑》，蘇黎世及法蘭克福，2006年，84頁載石膏版本圖片

《阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂工作室，阿爾伯托與安妮特·賈柯梅蒂基金會收藏》（展覽圖錄），龐畢度中心，巴黎，2007-08年，品號215，406頁載石膏版本圖片（題為《頭部與肩膀》）

阿爾伯托·賈柯梅蒂資料庫，編號AGD 3448，載圖（www.fondation-giacometti.fr）

Giacometti’s Buste de Diego is a highly expressive depiction of the artist’s brother and primary model, Diego. Of all the artist’s representations of the human figure, it is his portraits of Diego that are the most formally radical and visually engaging sculptures. Diego’s distinctive features inspired numerous variations on the theme of head and bust sculptures of the 1950s and their physiognomic similarity to the artist's brother invested these projects with an almost autobiographical narrative.  

‘To me’, Giacometti once stated, ‘sculpture is not an object of beauty but a way for me to try to understand a bit better what I see in a given head, to understand a bit better what appeals to me about it and what I admire in it' (reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, The Origin of Space (exhibition catalogue), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg & Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, 2010-11, p. 73). By the 1950s, Giacometti shifted his attention from the spindly, elongated figures of his post-war years, like Homme qui chavire, and turned to figural sculptures that were more naturalistic in scale. Most of these works were heads and half-length busts, completed between 1951 and 1957 and often executed from memory. For the most part, these sculptures were solid, designed without a base, and executed with the matiére pétrie, or kneaded method, which heightened the expressiveness of the figure. The artist relied on an intensely hands-on process for this sculpture to create the indentations and the folds of Diego's jacket and in the sharp bridge of his nose. ‘Each of these nebulous undergoing perpetual metamorphosis seems like Giacometti's very life transcribed in another language,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote when observing the artist at work on his sculptures in his studio (reprinted in ibid. 233).

‘These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person’, Yves Bonnefoy has written, ‘meeting his eyes and thereby understanding better 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. As Giacometti once said, "There is no difference between painting and sculpture." Since 1945, he added, "I have been practicing them both indifferently, each helping me to do the other. In fact, both of them are drawing, and drawing has helped me to see”’ (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, pp. 432-436).

Giacometti's choice of his brother Diego as the subject of this sculpture and numerous others was based on his comfortability and familiarity with his model. ‘He's sat for me thousands of times’, Giacometti said. ‘When's he's sitting there, I don't recognize him. I like to get him to sit, so as to see what I see’ (reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, The Origin of Space, ibid, p. 140). Like the hauntingly beautiful paintings of his brother which Giacometti executed at the same time, Buste de Diego demonstrates the artist's fascination with the emotive power of the sitter's face.

The original plaster for the present work is held by the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. The present cast was acquired in 1958 by the dealer Erica Brausen who founded the influential Hanover Gallery in London in 1946, which championed the art of British artists Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore as well as some of Europe's most important avant-garde artists. Brausen sold it on to one of her best clients, Ella Winter, an Anglo-American journalist married to the American writer Donald Ogden Stewart. It was exhibited as part of her collection at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam over the winter of 1961-62 before being reacquired by Erica Brausen for her personal collection and subsequently sold to private collectors in the United Kingdom.