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ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966) Portrait de Diego signed and dated “Alberto Giacometti 1961” (low...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,500,000.00 - 2,000,000.00 USD
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966) Portrait de Diego signed and dated “Alberto Giacometti 1961” (low...

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

(1901-1966)

Portrait de Diego

signed and dated “Alberto Giacometti 1961” (lower right)

oil on canvas

61 x 50.3 cm (24 x 19 3⁄4 in.)

painted in 1961

Estimate: £1,000,000–1,400,000

$1,500,000–2,000,000





Provenance

Galerie Maeght, Paris (acquired directly from the artist)

Sidney Janis, New York

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

Private Collection, USA

Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva

Acquired from the above by the present owner




Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Giacometti, May 1961, no. 23 (as Tête d’homme)

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, European Artists, January 9-February 4, 1961, n.n.

Basel, Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Giacometti, June 25-August 28, 1966, no. 122

Chur, Bündner Kunstmuseum, Alberto Giacometti, ein Klassiker der Moderne 1901-1966:
Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Bücher, October 22-December 31, 1978, no. 229 (illustrated)

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Portraits et Figures, February-April, 1982, p. 82, no. 44

Lugano, Galleria Pieter Coray, Omaggio a Giacometti, March 30-May 12, 1984, n.n. (illustrated in colour on catalogue cover)

Frankfurt-am-Main, Schirn Kunsthalle, Albert Giacometti, 1901-1966: Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, und Druckgraphik, October 6, 1998-January 3, 1999, p. 332,
no. 61 (illustrated in colour, p. 87)




Literature

Derrière le Miroir, Giacometti, Galerie Maeght, ed., Paris, May 1961, no. 23 (as Tête d’homme)

<p>We are grateful for Mary Lisa Palmer’s kind assistance in the preparation of this catalogue entry.

<p>
This powerful painting portrays Giacometti’s brother Diego, who acted for many years as his chief model. Diego, a gifted artist and furniture designer in his own right, also helped to run Giacometti’s studio and supervised the casting of his bronzes.
By 1961, the year of this brooding portrait, Giacometti had been incorporating his brother’s familiar head in his works for decades, but he never tired of it. In fact, the more often he portrayed Diego, the deeper the fascination became. The more there was to be discovered, the further Giacometti felt he was from achieving his ideal of finding a painterly equivalent for the human presence in front of him.
As James Lord, who sat for one of Giacometti’s greatest portraits, notes:
His entire concentration, and work, was concentrated on the head. Indeed, if he worked on the rest at all, it was only in order to situate the head in relation to the canvas as a whole, not because he expected eventually to complete the entire figure. He painted the head over and over. Before his eyes, the image must have come and gone much as the image seen through a camera lens may move in and out of focus.” (James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, New York, 1965, p. 17).
<p>
At least part of the power and terrible beauty of Giacometti’s great late portraits is to be found in the way in which they appear to the viewer as mirrors of the self. David Sylvester, quoting liberally from statements by Giacometti, highlights this aspect of Giacometti’s particular genius:
Giacometti’s “vision of urban reality suddenly filled with ‘an unbelievable sort of silence’ where any head was ‘as if it were something simultaneously alive and dead’, every object ‘had its own place, its own weight, its own silence, even’, was separated from other objects by ‘immeasurable chasms of emptiness’. And we, confronting the embodiments of those coalesced sensations, feel a shock of recognition
of ourselves and of our mutual separateness” (David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, p. 165).