Giacometti, Alberto

Autograph letter signed ("Alberto Giacometti"), 3 pages (10  5/8  x 8  1/2  in.; 270 x 215 mm) with 3 pen-and-ink drawings, Paris, 12 December 1959, to Marlene Dietrich; one vertical and one horizontal fold, minimal wear.  Autograph envelope (signed "Alberto Giacometti"), also inscribed "Giacometti" in red ink by Dietrich.

Lord, Giacometti: a Biography, pp 405–07, 409

A magnificent memento of Alberto Giacometti and Marlene Dietrich's brief, intense friendship.  It was Dietrich who initiated the relationship with the Swiss artist.  She was a conscientious visitor to museums and galleries; and sometime in the 1950's she encountered Giacometti's celebrated sculpture of an emaciated dog at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  She was so taken with the sculpture that she determined to make the artist's acquaintance.  The opportunity came in November 1959, when she came to Paris (accompanied by forty-four pieces of luggage) for a lengthy engagement at the Théâtre de l'Étoile.  Introductions were arranged and, as James Lord describes it in his magesterial biography of Giacometti, "It was the goddess who wooed the artist.  She went to his studio and sat in the dust while he perched atop his stepladder, slathering plaster onto the tall figures or hacking it off again.  One wonders how the seasoned enchantress saw those women conjured up before her eyes, or, on the other hand, how she looked to the sculptor as he gazed down at her from aloft."

The sculptor and actress became close almost immediately and began meeting regularly in the studio in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron and in a café in the rue Didot, where Dietrich was not recognized.  When Dietrich failed to keep her appointments with Giacometti, she usually sent him bouquets of long-stemmed red roses, like the ones depicted in the drawings in the present letter.  Although the artist's wife Annette was not disturbed by this blossoming friendship, his mistress, a prostitute known only as Caroline, was intensely jealous.  She demanded proof that she was more important to her lover than the screen goddess.  Toward the end of Dietrich's stay in Paris, Caroline ordered that Alberto fail to keep an appointment with Marlene.  The artist complied.  The next day, 11 December, Dietrich sent her customary red roses.  Giacometti then wrote the present letter on 12 December, including three ink drawings of the bouquet, expressing his pleasure and telling the actress that he is working on a small sculpture for her.  He ends the letter "Vous êtes merveilleuse, totalement.  Je vous embrasse."  Forty-eight hours before Dietrich was to leave Paris, he delivered the sculpture to her hotel in the rue de Berri.  Ten days later, Dietrich cabled the artist from Las Vegas, wishing him a happy new year.  It was to be the last communication he received from the busy performer.  She was back in Paris a month later, but made no effort to contact him.  "Fortunately," he remarked.  The affair, though intense, was most likely a platonic one; and Giacometti's greatest pleasure from it afterwards seemed to be in telling his elderly mother back in Switzerland that he was "close friends" with the legendary Marlene Dietrich.

A fine letter romantically linking two towering figures in the cultural life of the 20th century.  The three delicate drawings are most likely the only depictions of roses in the artist's œuvre.