In 1925, Diego Giacometti moved to Paris from his native Switzerland to join his brother who was beginning to make something of a name for himself on the local art scene. Just 13 months younger than Alberto Giacometti, who was the eldest of four, he was looking for direction and soon found it helping out in the studio. And, as he had as a child (the artistically precocious Alberto Giacometti’s first sculpture was a ‘’Portrait Head of Diego‘’ aged 12), after his older brother returned to modeling from life he also sat regularly for him.
Not that, a year or so later when they moved to the studio at 46 rue Hippolyte Maindron (where both worked until the end of their lives), Diego Giacometti didn’t pursue some art work independently, as Sonja Ganne relates in a 2009 Christies auction catalogue article about him entitled ‘’Brother, Where Art Thou…’’. (The sale item was a coffee table with a high estimate of $112,000 that fetched over $167,000). But overall he was doing more assisting than stepping up to the plate in his own creative right.
There was a third area of endeavor the Giacometti brothers shared, particularly for about a decade from around 1930: to make ends meet, they created design objects – and it was design that was ultimately to become Diego Giacometti’s supreme realm.
Alberto and Diego Giacometti As Designers
As Alberto Giacometti, to whom some 100 designs are credited, is quoted as saying in documentation to the 2009 Giacometti show at Basel’s Beyeler Foundation: ‘’At the time, [design] tended to be denigrated. It was viewed as a kind of relegation. Nevertheless, I tried to model furnishing objects…as well as I could, and found…that there was no difference between what I called a sculpture and what was an object.’’ This approach to the object as essentially sculptural was to emerge as a foundation of Diego Giacometti’s later work as designer.
By the mid '30s, based on some independent work he had done, Diego Giacometti started to receive personal commissions – in 1938, for wall and ceiling lights in perfumer Guerlain’s new premises on the Champs-Elysées for example.
Then, in 1940, the German army entered Paris. Alberto Giacometti spent the years 1942 to 1945 in Geneva, while Diego Giacometti stayed in Paris – and this period of separation from his brother changed him profoundly. He used the time to take courses, perfect skills, and explore his own creative talent.
Diego Giacometti On His Own
After the war, creatively speaking Diego Giacometti began making a more forceful mark of his own not only as a designer of furniture, accessories, even perfume bottles for Coco Chanel, but as an animal sculptor.
Utilitarian bronze candelabra and hurricane lamps, tables, chairs, benches and stools, incorporating foliage and animals or just animals as in the famous ‘’cat butler’’ (a cat on its hind legs holding a small tray for visitors to put their business cards on) took their place alongside animal figurines, all imbued with qualities of gentleness, a keen sense of observation that is never academically realistic, whimsy, humor, and earthiness (one table features a dog lifting its leg against a tree trunk).
Many see in Diego Giacometti’s furniture strong Etruscan and Roman influence. But Daniel Marchesseau, who in 1986 published the only major monograph yet on him, writes: ‘’Diego who went neither to museums nor gallery exhibitions, hit upon antique, eternal forms by instinct, conferring on them a new nobility. His forms are not reminiscences of the past, as some have supposed, these are original creations, occasionally inspired by chance.’’
Diego Giacometti: Consummate Artist-Designer
Be that as it may, as a major exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work at Zurich’s Kunsthaus revealed earlier this year, the artist – in his quest to capture the eternal core essence of the human being – was certainly heavily influenced by Egyptian art. And Diego Giacometti was influenced by his brother. But whatever the influences underlying the former’s production, like art-lovers today, 20th century viewers responded keenly to the poetry and timeless quality of his work.
Prestigious commission on prestigious commission followed; Giacometti’s order books were full. In 1983-84, by now in his early eighties, he produced furniture, lighting and other accessories (banisters, door fixtures) for the newly-created Musée Picasso housed in a grand historic 17th century building in the Marais section of Paris.
The beautiful result – contemporary design meshing splendidly with the period features – was a tribute to the agelessness and universality of Diego Giacometti's work. But he died shortly before the inauguration. His remains were brought to his native canton of Graubünden (Switzerland), to the cemetery where his brother is buried.
Readers of this article may also be interested in Alberto Giacometti – A Retrospective in Geneva.
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