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Lot Essay
The study of the human head was at the heart of Giacometti’s drawing practice and at the center of his lifelong quest for the truth of representation: “The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people...life itself is inside the skull” (Giacometti quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, p. 377). Whether in pen or pencil, on drawing paper, loose journal sheets, ripped book pages, or even restaurant napkins, Giacometti drew heads repeatedly. He returned to this motif throughout his artistic career, revealing his fascination for the face, and his neverending pursuit to capture its multidimensionality.
Diego was one of Giacometti’s most enduring subjects, but even a familiar face remained an object of investigation and discovery for the artist. Drawn in 1947, Tête de Diego subverts the traditional genre of portraiture. Here, Giacometti chose to only render the fundamental structures of Diego’s facial features: his distinct eye sockets, his supraorbital notch, the oval contour of his face, the dorsum of his nose, and the shadows created by his mouth and chin. Still, these features disappear under the superposition of lines resulting from the artist’s intense scrutiny of his subject and passionate efforts to convey the materiality of his head. The varying intensity of Giacometti’s many strokes give movement to the drawing, bringing life to its subject. Moreover, the great number of lines and repeated application of pencil around the principal features of the face and skull attest to Giacometti’s process of continually reworking images and his abiding obsession with this particular theme.
This superb drawing comes from the collection of Morton and Barbara Mandel, who acquired it from Pace Gallery New York in 1994. Over a period of 50 years, the couple assembled a remarkable collection of paintings and works on paper, spanning from great European Modern masters to Post-War American artists, of which the present work is an extraordinary example.
Diego was one of Giacometti’s most enduring subjects, but even a familiar face remained an object of investigation and discovery for the artist. Drawn in 1947, Tête de Diego subverts the traditional genre of portraiture. Here, Giacometti chose to only render the fundamental structures of Diego’s facial features: his distinct eye sockets, his supraorbital notch, the oval contour of his face, the dorsum of his nose, and the shadows created by his mouth and chin. Still, these features disappear under the superposition of lines resulting from the artist’s intense scrutiny of his subject and passionate efforts to convey the materiality of his head. The varying intensity of Giacometti’s many strokes give movement to the drawing, bringing life to its subject. Moreover, the great number of lines and repeated application of pencil around the principal features of the face and skull attest to Giacometti’s process of continually reworking images and his abiding obsession with this particular theme.
This superb drawing comes from the collection of Morton and Barbara Mandel, who acquired it from Pace Gallery New York in 1994. Over a period of 50 years, the couple assembled a remarkable collection of paintings and works on paper, spanning from great European Modern masters to Post-War American artists, of which the present work is an extraordinary example.