Buste

Giacometti spent the Second World War in Geneva, where he modeled heads and figures so tiny that they fit into a half-dozen matchboxes when he transported them to his Paris studio at the end of the war in 1945. There, he continued making miniscule works, and then began to enlarge them. Meanwhile, he was continually drawing, and he then began to paint again, taking as his subjects a few friends but most frequently his brother Diego, his new companion Annette Arm (both of whom he painted in his Paris studio), and his mother, who sat for him in Stampa. The present painting shows the same wraithlike attenuation of the face seen in concurrent modeled heads and figures. David Sylvester has written, "In the paintings, space is like a cloudy heavy liquid that is seen no less than the mass at the heart of it is seen, and is hardly less tangible. The mass has an energy that is turned inward upon itself, violently compressed around a central core, so that it seems to have a highly concentrated density. There is either outline or a multiplicity of outlines in the paintings to mark the transition space to mass" (Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, pp. 22-23).
The depiction of Diego, as both a specified subject and as a genericized symbol of man, is a constant in painting and sculpture throughout Giacometti's career. As Patrick Elliott notes, "In making the portraits and busts, Giacometti's general approach changed little: the sitter would pose on a chair placed on precise markers two to three metres in front of the artist and look him directly in the eye. The position and height of Giacometti's easel was similarly marked in order to maintain the same conditions on each sitting. In nearly all Giacometti's works, whether they be paintings or sculptures, the model is frontally posed and gazes directly forward. For Giacometti, it was the gaze that distinguished the living from the dead. He chose Diego as his principal model partly because he was always there, but more particularly because his features were so familiar and his personality didn't get in the way, 'When he poses for me I don't recognize him'" (Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat., Edinburgh, 1996, p. 23). As a young art student in 1917-1918 Giacometti had explored the hypnotic effect of gaze in frontal portraiture in his work but for the next two decades he painted only intermittently. He did not begin to focus on his painting until his return to Paris following World War II. He explained this change in an interview with André Parinaud, published in Arts in 1962, by saying, "I looked at the people in the theatre as if I had never seen them before. And at the moment, I suddenly felt the need to paint...to know how I was seeing, it became necessary for me to try to paint" (ibid., p. 28).
The first owner of this work, Dr. Charlotte Weidler (1895-1983) studied history, archeology and philosophy, and received her doctorate from the University of Vienna. She worked on the staff of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Weimar, and then as an art critic for newspapers in Berlin. She represented the Carnegie Institute in Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1939 where she became a close friend and advisor to G. David Thompson, the Pittsburgh steel magnate and collector who amassed a vast number of works by Giacometti during the 1950s and had his portrait twice painted by the artist. The Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung in Zürich acquired a large part of the Thompson collection in 1965. It was through her work with Thompson that Dr. Weidler became friendly with Giacometti and subsequently acquired Buste directly from him. The present owner was a close friend of Dr. Weidler, and acquired this painting from her.