+ Expand

Artist or Maker: Diego Giacometti (1902-1985)

+ Expand

Provenance: Romain Gary, Paris, by whom commissioned from the artist in 1961, and thence by descent; sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 16 April 1996, lots 248 & 249.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

+ Expand

Literature: D. Marchesseau, Diego Giacometti, Paris, 1986 (illustrated p. 112; plaster versions of Victoires de Samothrace figures illustrated pp. 37 & 112).
M. Anissimov, Romain Gary, le Caméléon, Paris, 2004, p. 350.

+ Expand

Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

The work of Diego Giacometti is a universe full of dreams and poetry. Long regarded as nothing more than the official and trustworthy assistant of his brother Alberto, it was only after the death of the latter in 1966 that Diego found himself free to express his own creativity, which one can already see in the lamps created by the two artists for Jean-Michel Frank in 1936.

Not since Emile Gallé and Louis Majorelle, the great cabinet makers and glass makers of the art nouveau movement, has an artist conceived sculpture with such a sense of the poetry of the natural world, whilst respecting the functionality of his meuble-sculptures.

While Alberto expressed through his sculptures his hidden feelings of rejected love for his mother, Diego considered himself an artisan whose only goal was to create beautiful and useful objects. His friends and assistants speak of his concerns for exactitude and his desire that his sculpture be practical, but also his ceaseless creativity.

For Marguerite Maeght, Diego created a dressing table and also a stool in which he included a little mouse standing on his hind legs on the cross brace, creating a work of art out of a purely functional item. The very structure of the chair thus becomes the animal's habitat, partially secluded from the human world but occasionally revealed to the viewer in an almost surprising fashion.

Almost all the pieces of furniture created by Diego are made in the same way. For the interior decorator Henri Samuel, Diego subdues the back of a chair in order to assign greater importance to a decorative tableau of animals. The same thing would later apply to the work he did for Romain Gary, whom Diego met through Henri Samuel and with whom he shared a love of women. Romain Gary, husband of the actress Jean Seberg, would later skirt controversy by being awarded a second Prix Goncourt under a pseudonym. He commissioned Diego to produce a large library crowned by Victoires de Samothrace when he moved to the rue du Bac in 1961. The influence of the antique on these large elements is more indebted to Alberto than to the natural world which was to characterise Diego's later style.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis