ALBERTO GIACOMETTI | Tête de Diego

Acquired from the artist by the father of the present owner

‘One might say that Diego was to Giacometti what the still-life was to Morandi or Mont-Saint-Victoire to Cézanne. Diego's features were etched on Giacometti's mind.’
Patrick Elliott in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 23  

Diego Giacometti remained Alberto’s primary model throughout the artist’s career and it was through numerous representations of his brother, translated both to paper and into bronze, that Alberto strove to demystify all that was concealed within a human head. Although preferring to work from memory, Giacometti repeatedly had his brother sit for him. Diego enabled Giacometti to study and best capture the emotive power of the human face and approach a familiar subject with the artist’s characteristic probing intensity opening a dialogue between sitter and viewer: ‘These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person […], meeting his eyes and thereby understanding better the compression, the narrowing that Giacometti imposed on the chin or the nose or the general shape of the skull. This was the period when Giacometti was most strongly conscious of the fact that the inside of the plaster or clay mass which he modelled was something inert, undifferentiated, nocturnal, that it betrays the life he sought to represent, and that he must therefore strive to eliminate this purely spatial dimension by constricting the material to fit the most prominent characteristics of the face’ (Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, pp. 432-436).

In the 1950s Giacometti moved away from the elongated figures of his walking men and standing women that prevailed during his war and post-war years and began working on sculpting several series of heads and half-length busts. These sculptures produced between 1951 and 1957 are some of Giacometti’s most formally radical, and already in Tête de Diego we begin to see the narrowing of the face which would culminate in the remarkable Grande tête mince of 1955. Many of Giacometti’s works of the 1950s, such as the present Tête de Diego, were designed without bases and executed using the matière pétrie, or kneaded method. This imbued each work with a heightened expressivity and created a textural surface redolent of the human face. Diego’s expression remains resolute and the hollows of his eyes convey a steady gaze evoking the nobility found in the busts of Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs. Such adept manipulation of the medium invites the viewer’s gaze and creates a sculpture replete with emotional impact. Diego’s features lend themselves well to the artist’s deeply intimate and hands-on method of working. The distinctive bridge of his nose is rendered instantly recognisable and this physiognomic similarity to Diego which permeates Giacometti’s thematic explorations of the head infuses the projects with an almost autobiographical narrative. These varying representations of his sitter combined with Giacometti's endless reworking of the material serve to emphasise the fluidity of perception. The human face is constantly changing as is our comprehension of it. No matter how well we familiarise ourselves with a certain face we can never know completely what lies beneath it.   

Coming from an edition of only three casts, Tête de Diego is particularly striking as it is made in aluminium, a departure from the customary bronze. The other two examples of Tête de Diego - also cast in aluminium - today reside at the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The present work was acquired directly from Giacometti by the father of the present owner and this February marks its first appearance at auction.



The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Giacometti and it is recorded in the Alberto Giacometti Database under number AGD4231.