3272 - DIEGO GIACOMETTI

DIEGO GIACOMETTI (Stampa 1902–1985 Paris) Porte-verres. Circa 1968. Silver-plated bronze and alabaster. Unique piece. Two glass plates (later). 87 × 44 × 44 cm. Certificate: Catherine Vincenot and Philippe Meier, Dijon/Lausanne, 20 July 2026. Provenance: - Gustav Zumsteg, commissioned from the artist. - Auction Koller, Zurich, 8 December 2004, lot 3037. - Private collection, Miami, acquired at the above auction. - Auction Christie’s, New York, 9 November 2006, lot 442. - Private collection, Switzerland, acquired at the above auction and passed by inheritance to the present owners. Literature: Daniel Marchesseau: Diego Giacometti, Paris 1986, p. 211 and pp. 72–73 (ill.). We thank Catherine Vincenot and Philippe Meier for confirming the authenticity of the work. The bronze ‘Porte-verres’ is an exceptional one-off creation by Diego Giacometti. In the late 1960s, around the time he was designing several lighting fixtures and a door handle for the Kronenhalle in Zurich, Gustav Zumsteg also commissioned him to make an object for the dining room of his silk-trading firm, Abraham. The result was a ‘présentoir’, or stand for glasses, approximately 90 cm high. Two wheels of different sizes, each supporting a glass shelf on which the glasses could be placed, are arranged one above the other around a central axis. The structure is crowned by an alabaster sphere. Especially captivating are the animal figures so characteristic of Giacometti’s work, which feature on almost all his furniture and decorative objects – small hybrid creatures inhabiting a world of fantasy. Above the lower shelf stands a little harpy, part bat, part vampire, resembling the figures Giacometti had incorporated several years earlier into the stools for the dressing table at the Maeghts’ villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Three chimeras perch above the upper shelf, surveying the scene. The ‘Porte-verres’ epitomises Giacometti as a ‘poet-craftsman’, effortlessly bringing together practical sturdiness, refined playfulness and imaginative invention. As Jean Leymarie, the art historian and a friend of Giacometti, aptly observed, he united ‘[...] a sense of the useful with the charm and freshness of the fairy-tale world.’ (Translated from: Daniel Marchesseau, Diego Giacometti, 1986, p. 22).