Conceived and cast in 1961, Tête d'homme is a powerful encapsulation of Alberto Giacometti’s most enduring muse, his brother Diego. Just a year younger than Alberto, Diego bore a marked physical similarity to the elder artist and inspired some of the most expressive sculptures of the modern era, their similar features imbuing each of these works with a hint of autobiographical narrative.
Diego was a constant presence at his brother’s studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Mandron; at the t.mes when Alberto began to sculpt, Diego continued to supervise the casting of his plasterwork and came to pose the artist. The sitters and sources of inspiration for Giacometti’s work were as important as they were small in number, with Diego proving the earliest and most oft portrayed of his subjects. In the early 1950s, a series of heads and busts of Diego heralded a change in the approach to his subject. After the miniature sculptures and the slender elongations of the post-war years (see fig. 1), Giacometti returned to a more naturalistic scale in his work.
The portraits of his wife Annette, another favored model, reflect the same attention to the nuances of expression of the person being portrayed as evinced in the present depiction of Diego (see fig. 2). With its curved eyebrows, marked jaw, full lips and upturned nose, Tête d'homme displays Diego's characteristic features, and yet catapults the figure to realms beyond the corporeal.
The peaks and hollows of the figure’s face bear the traces of Giacometti’s animated gestures and incisions. The figure’s placid gaze is tempered by the richly textured, almost agitated surface, revealing the artist’s powerful and expressive energy—perhaps just as much a portrait of the self as of the sitter. By grounding the figure’s head to a base without extraneous facets of the body yet fixing his subject’s gaze outward, Giacometti harness the stillness of the moment as well as the potential of the future; with Tête d'homme, Giacometti achieves the improbable task of integrating the present and impending moments, thereby expressing the great paradox of life itself.
The 1960s proved a monumental decade in the Giacometti’s career, with the realization of his large-format L’Homme qui marche works and the completion of his Grande femme series. Professionally, the artist was at his prime. At the 1962 Venice Biennale, Giacometti’s artistic achievements were recognized on a global stage—he was given an entire exhibition room for his work alone and later awarded the Grand Prize for sculpture. It was amid this fertile period of artistic development that Tête d'homme was born.
"No artist of this t.mes has questioned reality with such insistence, fury and wonder as Alberto Giacometti. Alone, against the tide, he persisted in having the model pose in the tiny, dusty studio where he worked for almost forty years. Even now, when he seems to be departing from his exclusive search, he still pursues it. He burnt his eyes and his life. He devoted all his strength to it to the point of exhaustion, in a battle of every moment, as if on a discovery, which he judged to be both derisory and impossible, depended the meaning of life and the destiny of art."
Market Precedent: Giacometti's Busts of Diego at Auction
