Diego Seated in the Studio

After 1925 Alberto Giacometti painted only intermittently, but in the aftermath of World War II, he returned to the canvas. Responding to a visionary experience in which he saw human heads transform into petrified, fixed objects in space, the artist began to make countless portraits from life. Most frequently, he used his wife and, as in this painting, his brother Diego as models. Giacometti was not interested in physiognomic accuracy but used a vortex of lines and a restricted palette to bring forth the abstract essence of his sitters. Often enclosing his subjects within “frames” painted on the canvas, he further isolated these dematerialized, solitary figures, evoking the melancholic existence of the postwar individual.