Alberto Giacometti

Annette Giacometti (and sold: Christie's, Paris, September 28, 2002, lot 5)
Acquired at the above sale

Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1984, illustration of the plaster p. 150
Giacometti: Giovanni, Augusto, Alberto, Diego (exhibition catalogue), Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo A.C., 1987, illustration of another cast p. 78
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1990-91, illustration of the plaster p. 498, illustration of another cast p. 499
Alberto Giacometti: sculptures, peintures, dessins (exhibition catalogue), Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1991-92, illustration of the plaster p. 300
Alberto Giacometti, La collezione di un amatore. Sculture, dipinti, disegni, grafica (exhibition catalogue), Galleria Pieter Coray, Lugano, 1995, illustration of another cast p. 26
A Very Private Collection: Janice H. Levin's Impressionist Pictures (exhibition catalogue), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002, illustration of another cast p. 140

This work is in excellent condition. Variegated reddish brown patina. One small nick to the back of the figure's head.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Buste de Diego is a powerful imagining of the artist's younger brother, Diego. In contrast with his full-length figural sculptures, the sculptures 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 are 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.

Discussing this period, Yves Bonnefoy writes, "These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person, 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" (Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti. A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, p. 432).

Valerie J. Fletcher tells us that the prominent eyes of these figures relate to Egyptian images from Faiyûm, which Giacometti kept pinned to the walls of his studio.  It is as if Diego's face, as Fletcher writes, "represents the human psyche, apparently prey to an indefinable, but frightening emotion" (Valerie J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti,1901-1989 (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1988-89). Indeed, this powerful sculpture seems to capture a particular sentiment that the artist once expressed in a Surrealist prose poem: "The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways" (quoted in ibid., p. 37).