Family Business

The Giacometti family were one of the most remarkable creative dynasties of the 20th century, a tight clan of cultural celebrities. Coming from the small Swiss-Italian town of Stampa, the family patriarch Giovanni (1868-1933) was a leading painter, whose cousin Augusto was revered for his stained glass, murals and posters.

Of Giovanni’s three sons, even Bruno (1907-2012), the least known, was a major architect – he created the Swiss Pavilion for the 1952 Venice Biennale. As for his famous elder brothers, Alberto (1901- 1966) and Diego (1902-1985), they lived and collaborated so closely as to form a sibling-studio, a bond strong as bronze. The Giacometti family were closer to a medieval guild of craftsmen than to modern specialists, refusing to distinguish between different modes of creativity. Alberto remains by far the more famous, but the technical skill and sheer manual labour that Diego devoted to his brother’s sculpture and furniture – and later to his own – was extraordinary.

The brothers were close in every sense, even age – Alberto was the eldest by a mere 13 months. And it is significant that Alberto’s very first sculpture, made when he was 13 years old, was a bust of Diego. Indeed, Diego remained Alberto’s model until death, a single head that Alberto worked on consistently, obsessively, throughout his career. Alberto settled in Paris in 1922, where he trained then worked as an artist; Diego remained the bon vivant vagabond until 1930, when he came to live and work with his brother.

During the 1930s, Alberto had become a successful designer through the patronage of Jean-Michel Frank. This was a remarkable partnership. Frank was wildly fashionable as an interior designer in New York and Europe, a cosmopolitan connoisseur who worked for the grandest and chicest clients. Diego was indispensable to Alberto: constructing armatures, casting and applying patina, building and crafting, perfecting and polishing both sculpture and furniture.

Diego Giacometti in his studio

Lot 13. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Floor Lamp ‘Tête de Femme’,' circa 1936. Estimate: $300,000 - 500,000

There was a steady demand for Alberto’s hand-crafted objets, and Diego was acknowledged as the architect of their success. Having helped make every aspect of his brother’s work, it was only logical that he should go on to create his own. There are strong continuities between their furniture, and some specialists provocatively claim Diego was the finer designer. What is not disputed is that their work together blurs any distinction between form and function, practicality and physicality, ‘mere’ furniture and ‘fine’ art. A good example is the lamp offered by Bonhams in New York’s Modern Decorative Art and Design sale in June. This simple domestic object is self-evidently sculptural – it is thought to depict Isabel Rawsthorne, the British artist and muse who was Alberto’s on-off lover for several years.

The importance of such work cannot be overestimated. Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, wrote in the catalogue for the gallery’s recent retrospective of Alberto’s work, calling his furniture “a very significant component of his artistic output during the 1930s, which established a close dialogue with his works of art, including a number of designs very much in tune with the fashionable ‘Nile Style’ of those years.” Alberto’s lifelong love of ancient Egypt began in childhood when he would copy archaeological discoveries such as those from el-Amarna, and it is certainly an obvious influence on his furniture.

Alberto designed some hundred pieces for Frank. Their work was loved by celebrated decorators such as Syrie Maugham and Frances Elkins, and used in Nelson Rockefeller’s Manhattan apartment and for Jorge and Matilda Born’s villa just outside Buenos Aires. Alberto’s first commission, for banker Pierre David-Weill in 1929, had come through the artist, André Masson, and he worked, too, with Yvonne Zervos and her Galerie M.A.I., which stood for meubles, architectures, installation – a fellow traveller in its refusal to demarcate or discriminate between areas of endeavour. But perhaps most important to Alberto were the Surrealist patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, who adorned their homes with his decorative objects and commissioned a sculpture for their garden at Hyères, which was completed in situ by Diego in 1932. They bought Alberto’s Table of 1933 – also offered by Bonhams New York – not ideal for resting a wine glass but very much of a summation of his design ideas.

Lot 12. Diego Giacometti (1902-1985), Carcasse a la Chauve-Souris table, circa 1965. Estimate: $300,000 - 500,000

The Giacometti family had a strong attraction to animals, thanks to their upbringing on a working farm. Alberto’s infamously emaciated canine earned him the friendship of Marlene Dietrich, while Diego made much decorative use of mice and Bruno’s greatest building was, appropriately enough, the Natural History Museum in Chur. Of course, the use of animals in domestic furniture has a history that runs all the way from the Egyptians through Renaissance carving, Black Forest marquetry and even the work of English revivalist Robert ‘Mousey’ Thompson, with his mouse trademark.

But Diego’s use of bats on the table offered by Bonhams is distinctive. It might well be linked to the deployment of bat motifs in Chinese furniture as a sign of good luck. The Wu Fu symbol, an interlaced circle of the ‘Five Bats of Happiness’ (love, health, riches, long life and natural death), can be found carved on wooden furniture as a good talisman, although some canny Chinese casinos use a pattern of bat wings supposedly to lure their punters to ruin.

Alberto’s connections enabled him to reach into almost every creative endeavour. His decorative bas-reliefs were being used as backgrounds for fashion photographs by Man Ray, and he created plaster wall-decorations for salonista Lise Deharme and jewellery and buttons for Schiaparelli. He was close to the architect-designer Emilio Terry (who owned the original version of Giacometti’s La Cage, now at Moderna Museet in Stockholm) and artist-illustrator Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard. The latter designed a carpet, executed by Alberto’s younger sister Ottilia, and in 1935 painted a triptych to celebrate the opening of Frank’s new boutique on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in which a vase by Alberto figures large in the foreground. Alberto even accepted – then rejected – a commission from Bérard’s lover Boris Kochno to do the sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo.

This very specific milieu, frothy and outrageously fashionable, was far removed from the high-brow heavyweights with whom Giacometti came to be associated – intellectuals, philosophers and writers such as Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Genet and Sartre. There was never any snobbery on Alberto’s part concerning the vast and varied cast of characters with whom he collaborated, but, when he was formally excommunicated from the Surrealists, one of their chief complaints was that Alberto made “decorative objects for a luxury clientele”.

In fact, like any real artist, he was willing to turn his hand to anything, from a key tree for Samuel Beckett for a production of Waiting for Godot to architectural projects with American architect Gordon Bunshaft for the Chase Manhattan Plaza or with the Maeght family for their foundation, and even memorial gates at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

Alberto in his austere studio with one of his elongated sculptures

Detail of Alberto Giacometti’s bronze lamp with a portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, his sometime lover

Diego Giacometti in the studio that he shared with his brother for 40 years

Taking flight: Diego’s bat detail from the table offered at Bonhams is a reference to the Chinese symbol for luck

Diego, by contrast, launched his own design career discreetly and only later in life. His reputation as a master craftsman, however, was already strongly established among those who knew and loved the work he had done from his brother’s studio. These included such important tastemakers as Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton and the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, who all became his dedicated collectors. Diego was unusual in many ways. He was extremely modest, refusing any exhibition in his lifetime, and his working methods were exquisitely patient and slow, a genuinely artisanal process of bespoke design only suited for individual clients. He was unique, too, in making his maquettes in plaster instead of wax or clay, and insisting on bronze-casting not iron, a direct influence of those many decades spent living and working with his brother at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron.

There they had spent 40 years together, in an atmosphere of incessant creativity. The only furniture in this place – the most rudimentary and ramshackle of boltholes – never changed: a single bed covered in books and paintings, a table, a rickety cabinet, a wardrobe and a stool. To cheer up the bedroom, Alberto painted a shelf with an apple, glass and bottle directly on the wall. The only important piece of furniture was for his sitter, a chair whose precise location was meticulously marked with coloured chalks on the studio floor. Of this seat, Alberto said, “I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.”

In the end, it seems pernickety to try too hard to distinguish between i fratelli Giacometti, rather than admire how perfectly they complemented one another. Their production stands in the long tradition of domestic objects made by artists, from Cellini to Piranesi, through Dalí, their friend Francis Bacon (who began as a furniture designer), Noguchi, Les Lalanne, Scott Burton and Donald Judd. Or, as Alberto put it presciently in a 1948 letter to his dealer Pierre Matisse, “I am Left Detail of Alberto Giacometti’s bronze lamp with a portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, his sometime lover able to make objects only because Diego works very well and deals with all aspects of casting etcetera, but objects interest me hardly any less than sculpture, and there is a point at which the two touch.”

Adrian Dannatt’s most recent book and exhibition was Doomed and Famous, published by Sequence Press and held at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York.