.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Throughout his life, Giacometti preferred to use his family and closest friends as models, especially his brother Diego and later his wife Annette, whose familiar features did not distract him from his modeling, drawing and painting. In 1941, Giacometti left war-time Paris for Geneva, where his mother had moved in order to look after her grandson, Alberto's nephew, Silvio, who thus also became a favoured subject.
As in almost all of Giacometti's portraits in every medium, Silvio is depicted from a frontal view, and typically for the artist's war-time oeuvre, the bust is tiny and mounted on a relatively large base: between 1940 and 1945, the artist modeled only on this tiny scale, describing in his own words that 'in 1940 the heads became minute, practically disappeared. I could only make out a mass of details, and in order to see the whole thing, I had to put the model further and further away. The further away the model was, the smaller the head became, a fact which horrified me' (A. Giacometti, Ecrits, Paris, 1990, pp. 272-273). These tiny heads reflect the artist's distinctive attempts to represent scale: seeing his model posing a few feet away, without calibrating perspective, the head would seem as though it were only a few inches high.
The relatively enormous bases on which these heads are typically mounted were inspired by a night-time revelation, when having seen his lover Isabel walking far off on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he developed the idea to create a sense of surrounding space in sculptural form (A. Giacometti, Ecrits, Paris, 1990, p. 288).
As in almost all of Giacometti's portraits in every medium, Silvio is depicted from a frontal view, and typically for the artist's war-time oeuvre, the bust is tiny and mounted on a relatively large base: between 1940 and 1945, the artist modeled only on this tiny scale, describing in his own words that 'in 1940 the heads became minute, practically disappeared. I could only make out a mass of details, and in order to see the whole thing, I had to put the model further and further away. The further away the model was, the smaller the head became, a fact which horrified me' (A. Giacometti, Ecrits, Paris, 1990, pp. 272-273). These tiny heads reflect the artist's distinctive attempts to represent scale: seeing his model posing a few feet away, without calibrating perspective, the head would seem as though it were only a few inches high.
The relatively enormous bases on which these heads are typically mounted were inspired by a night-time revelation, when having seen his lover Isabel walking far off on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he developed the idea to create a sense of surrounding space in sculptural form (A. Giacometti, Ecrits, Paris, 1990, p. 288).