Alberto Giacometti

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in the 1970s

Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1950, illustration of another cast p. 23
Palma Bucarelli, Giacometti, Maestri del XX Secolo, Rome, 1962, no. 47, illustration of the plaster
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1990, illustration of another cast p. 70
Alberto Giacometti: Sculture, dipinti, disegni (exhibition catalogue), Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1995, no. 45, illustration of another cast p. 24
Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle, Vienna; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1996, no. 44, illustration of another cast
Jean Soldini, Alberto Giacometti: La Somiglianza introvabile, Milan, 1998, illustration of another cast p. 136
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthaus Zürich, 2001-02, illustration of another cast p. 201

Buste de Diego, completed in 1950, is a polychromed bronze bust of the artist's collaborator and younger brother, Diego.  Giacometti occassionally painted his bronzes, enhancing the individuality of each cast and investing his sculptures with a medium usually reserved for canvas.  At earlier points in his career, he had painted his plasters, but he only began applying paint to his bronzes in 1950.  With regard to this process, Giacometti once wrote, "...in reality we always see in colour, don't we?  If I make a sculpture in grey clay or cast in bronze, the impression of thinness is greater; if I paint it it tends to look much more true than if it's not painted.  That's why I always feel I wanted to make painted sculpture " (quoted in David Sylvester, New York, Giacometti, 1994, p. 214).

In contrast to his full-length figural sculpures, the likenesses that Giacometti executed of Diego are often modest in scale and more emphatically focused on the nuances of the sitter’s face.  Most of these works were heads and half-length busts, completed between 1950 and 1957 and often conceived from memory.  The process by which he executed them was highly tactile, using his hands to make impressions in the clay in what is known as the matière pétre, or kneaded method.  The resulting image is highly expressive and personalized by the artist's visible fingerprints in the surface of the sculpture.   It has been pointed out that one side of the face seems to be more firm and youthful while the other side bears the signs of age and haggardness of an older man.  The passage of time was a major theme in Giacometti's work, and here, it factors into the rendering of the artist's younger brother.