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Lot Essay
This lot is listed under the number AGD 3613 in the Alberto Giacometti Database.
The present work depicts Alberto and Diego Giacometti’s painter father, Giovanni (fig. 1). In the summer of 1927, Alberto created several busts of his father while staying at his house in Switzerland during the summer. The treatment of the first of these busts is entirely traditional, fully modeled and naturalistically rendered. However, over time they take on a more schematic presentation. The tactile depth of Giacometti the sculptor yields to the incised lines of Giacometti the draughtsman. Giovanni’s features are drawn more than sculpted, his proper left eye surrounded by a networks of lines akin to the rapid, frenzied strokes of the Giacometti’s pen on paper.
As Yves Bonnefoy has explained, “what preoccupied the son, back in his studio, was, to some extent at least, Giovanni’s gaze fixed on him, questioning if not accusing him. After all, the young sculptor had just opted for Paris, he had settled in a place, and he was wondering, with the anxiety we know of, what he would succeed in achieving at last –all good reasons for wondering also what his perceptive and generous father thought of him now, this father who had trusted him so much and for so long, but had recently suggested discreetly that he might try to show and sell his work: that is to say, of course, to end the years of shilly-shallying and to settle down and create something” (Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 156).
The present work depicts Alberto and Diego Giacometti’s painter father, Giovanni (fig. 1). In the summer of 1927, Alberto created several busts of his father while staying at his house in Switzerland during the summer. The treatment of the first of these busts is entirely traditional, fully modeled and naturalistically rendered. However, over time they take on a more schematic presentation. The tactile depth of Giacometti the sculptor yields to the incised lines of Giacometti the draughtsman. Giovanni’s features are drawn more than sculpted, his proper left eye surrounded by a networks of lines akin to the rapid, frenzied strokes of the Giacometti’s pen on paper.
As Yves Bonnefoy has explained, “what preoccupied the son, back in his studio, was, to some extent at least, Giovanni’s gaze fixed on him, questioning if not accusing him. After all, the young sculptor had just opted for Paris, he had settled in a place, and he was wondering, with the anxiety we know of, what he would succeed in achieving at last –all good reasons for wondering also what his perceptive and generous father thought of him now, this father who had trusted him so much and for so long, but had recently suggested discreetly that he might try to show and sell his work: that is to say, of course, to end the years of shilly-shallying and to settle down and create something” (Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 156).