Diego Giacometti's furniture is a wonderful work of art. For a long time, however, hardly anyone noticed.

He simply described himself as a craftsman. Being the son of a famous painter, Giovanni Giacometti, and the brother of an even more famous sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, seemed perfectly sufficient to him. But his artistic genes knew better: genius also slumbered in Diego Giacometti. And it eventually found its expression.

A piece of Diego Giacometti furniture is instantly recognizable. His bronze chairs, tables, shelves, and lamps are characterized by elegant simplicity and proportional balance. They always have that certain touch of the handmade, the modeled, the molded—the tactile.

In addition, these pieces of furniture are often accompanied by a botanical melody: leaves, branches, trees. Or enlivened by the orchestra of a veritable bestiary: Diego Giacometti's love of animals is reflected in the wonderfully sculpted owls, owlets, mice, deer, foxes, dogs, and cats that are integrated into his furniture creations. The virtuoso artist-designer rarely read books. But it was animal books that inspired him.

As a child, his talent lay deep in the shadows. In contrast, his older brother Alberto, the firstborn of the famous Giacometti family of artists from Stampa in the Bregaglia Valley, created a bust of Diego at an early age, demonstrating his talent. The "Head of Diego" from 1914/15, made of plasticine, was Alberto Giacometti's very first sculpture. Diego, his big brother's model, would sit for him for countless hours throughout his artistic career – patiently, motionlessly, as the master demanded.

Alberto was practically dependent on Diego for this. Diego became his irreplaceable assistant in Paris. He prepared the materials from which Alberto sculpted his figures. He constructed the iron wire reinforcements for the fragile goddesses his brother molded from clay. He cast them in plaster so they could be immortalized in bronze. And soon, he was also considered the best bronze patinator in all of Paris.

Diego Giacometti initially wanted nothing to do with art. He graduated from business school and tried various odd jobs. As a sales representative, he led a dandy life driven by existential unrest between Basel, Chiasso, Marseille, and Paris, with moderate success.

"If you were willing to come to Paris, I would be very happy. I have so much to do that you could work with me and, of course, for yourself," Alberto wrote in the fall of 1929 to Diego, who had returned home to Stampa in the Bergell valley after his failed professional adventures. Diego answered the call, working from then on for his brother and also for himself, in Alberto's shadow, and without the world taking much notice.

It wasn't until 1985, at the opening of the Musée Picasso in Paris, three months after his death, that Diego would have had his first museum appearance with his own art. In 1983, he received the prestigious commission to decorate the planned Picasso Museum. This was the pinnacle of his career; he was almost eighty years old at the time. Diego created lamps, benches, chairs, and low tables that not only harmonize with the monumental spaces of the old building in the Marais, but also manage to enter into a dialogue with Picasso's works.

Now Diego Giacometti is making a return to a museum. And not as a decorator. For the first time, a museum is recognizing him as an artist in his own right. The Graubünden Art Museum in Chur is dedicating a comprehensive special exhibition to him. It elevates Diego Giacometti's works to the pedestal of art. They are presented as sculptures, thus on a par with the paintings and sculptures of Giovanni Giacometti and Alberto Giacometti.

A leather-covered bench with four massive bronze legs, which usually serves as a seat for visitors at the Kunsthaus Zürich, now stands elevated on a sky-blue pedestal above the exhibition floor. All of the larger creations in this comprehensive show are displayed on such pedestals.

According to the generally accepted consensus on genre terminology, his works did not belong in an art museum until now: Fine art was strictly separated from decorative arts. Until then, Diego Giacometti was only honored in the context of applied arts: Shortly after his death in 1986, the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, where his entire estate is now located, dedicated an exhibition to him. In Switzerland, his furniture was shown in 1988 at the Bellerive Museum of Decorative Arts in Zurich.

The Kunstmuseum Chur is the only fine arts museum in Switzerland that recently added a few works by Diego Giacometti to its own collection. In 2016, the museum received a donation of a table, a chair, andirons, and an impressive candlestick that Diego Giacometti had made for his brother Alberto for his fiftieth birthday. It features five candlesticks, one for each decade, and is adorned with two horse heads, which could symbolize the brothers' loyalty. Alberto and Diego shared a deep affection. Their brotherly bond grew stronger over the years as they lived and worked next door to each other in Paris.

Diego Giacometti was long perceived as undervalued. However, this was partly the artist's fault. When signing his own works, he always omitted his family name so as not to compete with Alberto Giacometti.

Diego Giacometti was reserved, taciturn, and lived a reclusive life. He did not strive for public recognition or fame. For over 20 years, he lived with Nelly Constantin, a woman about whom virtually nothing is known; not even a photograph exists. She was 19 when Diego fell in love with her, already divorced, and had a young son, whom Diego raised as his own. His mother, Annetta Giacometti, never approved of this liaison. Diego and Nelly never married, nor was his partner ever introduced to her mother at home in the Bregaglia Valley.

All of this fits Diego Giacometti's modest nature. Yet he was successful in Paris from the very beginning. As early as the 1930s, he and Alberto created luxurious objects commissioned by Jean-Michel Frank, a renowned furniture designer and interior designer, that received exceptional acclaim.

For an illustrious clientele, including fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy and the Maeght art dealer family, he created comprehensive interiors with banisters, libraries, and lighting fixtures that represent true Gesamtkunstwerken. At the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, for example, the café's interior, alongside site-specific works by Joan Miró and Georges Braque, forms an integral part of this important art venue.

Diego Giacometti's objects are now found in prestigious private collections and fetch top prices on the art market. The recently deceased doyen of the Swiss art trade, Eberhard W. Kornfeld, was able to seat each guest at a dinner for twelve people on a Diego chair. He knew Alberto's silent assistant personally and had ordered the chairs himself. They are now grouped around a round table in Chur, decorated with birds, frogs, and leaves.

Diego also designed the interior design for the Kronenhalle bar in Zurich. The commission came from Gustav Zumsteg, the silk merchant and son of the owner of the Kronenhalle restaurant. He had a vision for a bar, which he realized in 1965 with Zurich interior designer Robert Haussmann. Diego designed the lamps on the bar and the pendant lights, the table legs, and the entrance door handle.

It was long believed that Diego Giacometti worked for Alberto Giacometti for around 40 years; only after Alberto's death in 1966 and during the last 20 years of his life did he work independently. The exhibition in Chur, featuring numerous works from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, refutes this notion. A striking example in the show is a perfectly formed bronze lioness from 1931, when Diego was 29 years old.

The modest artist probably only desperately fought for attention once – perhaps from his mother, who idolized her eldest son, Alberto. In 1907, at the age of five, Diego severely injured his right hand on the gears of a running hay-cutter. Three fingers required surgery, and the middle finger had to be severed roughly in half. Diego always tried to hide this disability. The memory of the accident, however, inspired Alberto, during his Surrealist phase, to create the sculpture "Endangered Hand" of 1932. It shows a hand locked in a cage, tied to a device operated by a crank.

Only many years after the accident did Diego admit that it was no accident. He had deliberately put his hand in the gears. After all, as a skilled craftsman, Diego kept his successful brother's art machine running for decades. The exhibition in Chur now impressively demonstrates the extraordinary things he accomplished as an artist with his hands.

“Diego Giacometti,” Graubünden Art Museum Chur, until November 9.