Sotheby’s is selling a full-scale bronze cast of the Laocoön made in the early 19th century, when the statue had been looted by Napoleon and brought to Paris. But that’s not important now. Because look at this ballpoint pen drawing Alberto Giacometti made of the statue in 1952.
“Ever since I first saw reproductions of works of art—and this goes back to my earliest childhood, to my earliest memories—I felt an immediate desire to ‘copy’ all those that I liked best, and this delight in copying has never really again left me,” Giacometti said in “Notes on copies,” a text included in the posthumous 1967 publication, Le copie del passato, published in English as Alberto Giacometti: A Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings. Some of Giacometti’s notebooks were exhibited in the Guggenheim’s 2018 retrospective