{"id":10020502,"date":"2025-08-06T17:51:45","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T16:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/art-and-design\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T09:56:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T08:56:01","slug":"culture-diego-giacometti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/culture-diego-giacometti\/","title":{"rendered":"Diego Giacometti"},"content":{"rendered":"

With his furniture and everyday objects, Diego Giacometti continually crossed the boundary between art and design. For decades, the artist, who died in 1985, stood in the shadow of his older brother; now the B\u00fcndner Kunstmuseum in Chur is dedicating a major retrospective to him.<\/p>\n

\u00bbDiego’s importance to his older brother Alberto is just beginning to be widely recognized\u00ab, wrote the New York Times<\/em>\u00a0 in 1985 about the then 82-year-old artist Diego Giacometti, who had spent decades in the shadow of his famous brother. It took even longer for Diego Giacometti\u2019s own artistic work\u2014after more than three decades of supporting Alberto\u2019s practice\u2014to gain the recognition it deserved as an independent oeuvre.<\/p>\n

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But first, let\u2019s rewind to the beginning: Alberto and Diego Giacometti were born in Switzerland in 1901 and 1902. The two brothers grew up alongside two other siblings in a family shaped by the artistic pursuits of their father, the painter Giovanni Giacometti. Diego initially devoted himself to drawing and experimented with etching, later completed a commercial apprenticeship, and finally followed his older brother\u2014who was studying sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle in Paris\u2014to the French capital. When Alberto received commissions to design and produce furnishings, the skilled craftsman Diego grew increasingly interested in his brother\u2019s work, supporting him with plaster casts, scaffolding production, and sculpting activities.<\/p>\n

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During the Second World War, Diego Giacometti attended courses at the Scandinavian Academy of Art<\/em>\u00a0 and created his first sculptures\u2014including several extraordinary animal figures. From 1950 onwards, he focused primarily on designing furniture and artistic everyday objects. \u00bbThe brothers were very different. Alberto was supremely self-confident, highly cultivated and insatiably curious. Diego was more instinctive, more physical and sometimes impenetrably self-effacing,\u00ab describes Michael Brenson in the New York Times<\/em>, highlighting their differences. What united them, however, was their exceptional sense of scale and form, as well as a deep passion for artistic work and craftsmanship.<\/p>\n

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After the death of his brother in 1966, Diego Giacometti increasingly realized his own artistic visions, whereby his main focus was on designing artistic, often filigree furniture. He designed salon tables, armchairs and consoles made of glass and bronze. In addition, he created numerous pieces such as the \u00bbtable in the shape of a skeleton\u00ab. Giacometti designed several pieces of furniture for the world-famous Kronenhalle\u00a0<\/em> bar in Zurich and the entire interior of the \u00bbCaf\u00e9 Diego\u00ab in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for the Fondation Maeght<\/a>. His last major commission attracted international attention and made him known to a wider public: Diego Giacometti designed the entire interior of the Mus\u00e9e Picasso<\/a> in Paris, which opened in September 1985\u2014from the furniture to the banisters and door fittings to the ceiling lights. With their filigree structure, the latter are reminiscent of large birdcages and were made of plaster-coated iron. However, the artist did not live to see the ceremonial opening of the museum: Diego Giacometti died in Paris in July 1985. As he gave away many of his works or sold them privately, his entire oeuvre is still not fully documented.<\/p>\n

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The B\u00fcndner Kunstmuseum in Chur<\/a> is presenting a large-scale exhibition dedicated to the artist, on view until November 9, 2025. For the first time, Giacometti\u2019s furniture is shown in an art context rather than a design context. The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Mus\u00e9e des Arts d\u00e9coratifs<\/a> in Paris, where Diego Giacometti\u2019s estate is held. [SW]<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With his furniture and everyday objects, Diego Giacometti continually crossed the boundary between art and design. For decades, the artist, who died in 1985, stood in the shadow of his older brother; now the B\u00fcndner Kunstmuseum in Chur is dedicating a major retrospective to him. \u00bbDiego’s importance to his older brother Alberto is just beginning to be widely recognized\u00ab, wrote the New York Times\u00a0 in 1985 about the then 82-year-old artist Diego Giacometti, who had spent decades in the shadow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10020490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[336,351,348],"tags":[418,393,375,358],"class_list":["post-10020502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-culture","category-latest","tag-culture-en-2","tag-design-en","tag-designer-en","tag-kunst-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10020502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10020502"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10020502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10020511,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10020502\/revisions\/10020511"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10020490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10020502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10020502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10020502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}