Portrait of Aimé Maeght
Diego was reticent to do portraits of his friends. Perhaps Alberto’s quest in the subject had an influence. In choosing to limit himself to designing furniture and creating a partly secret bestiary, Diego kept a subject that became his. Five attempts remain, spread out over thirty years. In 1960, he drew the features of Aimé Maeght. Like all of Diego’s figurines, this head is small, imbued with the model’s curiosity and angular aspect of the profile.
Diego Giacometti (1902 - 1985)
Diego Giacometti’s career was based on four periods.
From 1927 to 1941, he worked with Alberto creating lights, particularly for the decorator Jean-Michel Franck, and continued to pose for him.
From 1941 to 1945, he was alone in Paris and fulfilled paltry orders to survive in the occupied city. He took classes at the Scandinavian Academy, making his first animal figures in plaster, which he hung from the corners of the ceiling of the bedroom of his friend the painter Francis Gruber.
From 1945 to 1966, he was Alberto’s practitioner for marble and stone and often made his brother’s works in bronze. At the same time he created candlesticks, bases and sculpture stands, then tables, desks and shelves in bronze.
When his brother died in 1966, he succeeded in his personal approach by making his furniture-sculptures and sculptures with Etruscan or Egyptian precision. He devoted the two last years of his life to perfecting bronze furniture and lights in resin for the National Picasso-Paris museum. Until then only a small number of art lovers were familiar with his work, which the public would only discover in 1985, shortly after he died, when the Picasso museum was inaugurated.
