Showing posts with label Alberto Giacometti. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Francis Bacon / Giacometti

Francis Bacon

1909-1992

Top 21 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold (2025 Updated)


Francis Bacon is one of the most powerful and unsettling figures in 20th-century art. His paintings, almost obsessively focused on the human figure, expose the body as a space of tension, violence, and vulnerability, stripping it of all idealization. Through visceral and radical painting, Bacon reformulated figurative language in an era dominated by abstraction, demonstrating that the representation of the body could still be a site of risk and truth.

The day I was drawn by Alberto Giacometti

‘Giacometti refused to let my father buy the drawings, telling us he wouldn’t sell them because they were no good.’ Photograph: Gordon Parks

The day I was drawn by Alberto Giacometti

The Swiss artist was on an endless search for perfection and created beautiful pieces that he was never happy with

Lord Sainsbury

Sunday 17 April 2017

t was 1955 and I was a lanky 15-year-old, on holiday in south-west France with my parents. On the way back to our hotel one day my mother said to my father: “David looks like a Giacometti figure; why don’t we get Giacometti to do some drawings of him?” My father thought it was a great idea, so I was taken to Paris by train the next day, to his studio.

My parents had first met Giacometti in 1949, when they bought two pieces from him. They’d kept in touch over the years, so it didn’t seem at all strange to visit. His studio was small and dilapidated, and overcrowded with large sculptures at various stages of completion. I was extremely nervous about the whole thing: I’d gone from the Lascaux caves to being drawn by a great artist within the space of 24 hours. He answered the door in a jacket and tie, looking not at all as I, an English public schoolboy, expected an artist to look. My parents left and he began to draw. For the next two hours there was silence. He spoke very little English and I was too shy to utter any of my limited French. Occasionally he’d put his head in his hands and groan.

By the time my parents came back, there were five beautiful drawings. My father decided he wanted to buy three, but Giacometti refused, telling us he wouldn’t sell them because they were no good. My father insisted on paying, but he wouldn’t take a penny. After much to-ing and fro-ing, Giacometti’s girlfriend, Annette, came into the room and after a chat about life it emerged that, more than anything else in the world, Annette wanted a mackintosh from Marks & Spencer. So Giacometti struck a deal: my parents would be given the three drawings and, when we got back to England, they would send a mackintosh to Annette by way of payment.

I met with Giacometti a few more times in subsequent years. He was the most fascinating man, a respected artist who’d come from quite a comfortable background, but was most at ease in his rundown studio or a cheap hotel with just a notebook for company. It was very clear he didn’t want middle-class comforts. They were a distraction. It was a bleak setting, but in that room he created the most beautiful works. He was on an endless search for perfection and would make no issue of destroying pieces that weren’t up to scratch. He even asked my father to return the drawings of me “to be finished”, but it was known that he’d often do that with works he was unhappy with and then never return them.

I was recently going through some papers when I discovered a bill from Aquascutum for a mackintosh, with a letter to my parents from Annette. She thanked them for the “most beautiful thing in the world” – the coat – and made a point of saying how much “Alberto” loved it, too.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, November 14, 2010

How Christine Keeler provided inspiration for Giacometti

Christine Keeler, a key figure in the 1963 Profumo Scandal which rocked the government, was the subject of intimate sketches by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

How Christine Keeler provided inspiration for Giacometti

As the Profumo scandal raged, the artist Alberto Giacometti was fascinated by a French news report and dashed off some previously unknown sketches

Dalya Alberge

Sunday 14 November 2010

Dozens of previously unknown sketches by the artist and sculptor Alberto Giacometti have come to light, including impromptu drawings of Christine Keeler, the showgirl whose 1960s affair with Conservative minister John Profumo shook the British establishment.

Nine months ago, one of Giacometti's sculptures sold for £65m. Now the Swiss artist's family has allowed his biographer, the distinguished art historian Michael Peppiatt, access to the collection for a major new book and a loan exhibition. The unseen images reveal Giacometti at his most intimate and unselfconscious.

Giacometti seems to have taken his inspiration for the Keeler sketch from a 1963 French newspaper report. A series of nude female figures sketched across a page from France-Soir is thought to represent her. The collection also contains sculptures, paintings and drawings not seen since they left his dilapidated studio in Paris. Another find is an art book owned by Giacometti which he used to produce a striking drawing of Van Gogh's self-portrait.

CHRISTINE KEELER

Another previously unknown sketch appears across a torn-out page of L'Express, a 1964 edition with a report on Lee Harvey Oswald, President John Kennedy's assassin. Giacometti scribbled over Oswald's photograph, giving him a beard and scrawling across the page the repeated word continuare ("to go on") and the phrase "the busts were made quickly, and a painting this evening, the drawings soon". The words seem to convey Giacometti's constant urge to push himself into yet more work. The artist, who died in 1966, obsessively scrutinised his work for hints of failure, always destroying works that did not match his vision. Peppiatt said that the newspaper sketches showed that drawing was fundamental for Giacometti. "Drawing was a form of instinctive thinking for him. He was never without a pencil in his hand or a fag in his mouth," he explained.

Peppiatt, an art critic for the Observer during the 1960s, recalled his excitement at being given access to the images, taken from a collection owned by the widow of Giacometti's nephew, Silvio Berthoud: "There is something very intimate about these works. I was allowed to choose from 300 drawings. I was deeply moved. I felt that Giacometti was almost there with me … as if his drawings were dropping from his hands. He had scribbled over the inside covers of books, doodled on bits of paper in cafes." Some of the unknown images are in Peppiatt's forthcoming book, In Giacometti's Studio, and a loan exhibition he has curated at the Eykyn Maclean gallery in New York.

Through newly published letters, Peppiatt offers new insight into Giacometti, the man and his art. He has delved into the artist's relationships, notably his doomed affair with Isabel Rawsthorne, a raucous, bohemian painter and model.

Peppiatt said: "Isabel was a terrifying animal, a man-eater. She was having affairs with both sexes and drinking everybody under the table. He was ambivalent towards women. What he liked were prostitutes. Giacometti was both attracted and repelled by Isabel." Feelings of despair emerge from their letters, Peppiatt said. In one, Giacometti wrote: "I didn't think your stay was a washout, Isabel, otherwise I wouldn't have felt so upset when you left. My throat was tight. I was sobbing inside."

Peppiatt also casts light on the artist's friendship with Samuel Beckett. Describing Giacometti's skeletal figures as a visual embodiment of the Irish writer's pared down prose, he said: "They had the same nocturnal habits. They'd bump into one another in Montparnasse around midnight, go to the same brothels together and walk home together." He tried to imagine their conversations as they strolled the deserted streets. "I researched and researched, following every line of inquiry, until I came to the truth," he recalled. These 20th-century geniuses would walk in "deep, utter, total silence", he said.

THE GUARDIAN