Alberto Giacometti – Lustre avec femme, homme et oiseau UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £7.6 MILLION
A dramatic chandelier by Alberto Giacometti comes up at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale on February 28. Estimated at £6-8 million Lustre avec femme, homme et oiseau brings together the artist’s most celebrated figures, Walking Man and Standing Woman. It is one of only three casts by Giacometti for select patrons and a unique instance where all of the key motifs of the artist’s career appear in a single work.
The chandelier encapsulates the existential anxiety of the post-war period whilst casting magical shadows that animate Giacometti’s heightened reality. It is coming to auction for the first time.
Thomas Bompard of Sotheby’s said: “This beautiful chandelier by Alberto Giacometti is the tangible coming together of visual arts, decoration and theatre. Despite a natural tendency for introversion, Giacometti became a figurehead of existentialism – finding his place at the centre of the avant-garde scene of artists and intellectuals in Paris. He was sought after by patrons, dealers and fellow artists, collaborating with the likes of modernist playwright Samuel Beckett to capture the fragile but powerful beauty of what hadn’t been destroyed by the Second World War. This is much more than a chandelier: it is a beacon of universal symbolism, of hope and humanism.”