Bruno Giacometti, Switzerland
Private Collection, Switzerland
Acquired by the present owner in 2013

Alberto Giacometti Exposition au Japon (exhibition catalogue), Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1983, illustration of another cast n.p.
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 1987-88, illustration of the plaster p. 248
L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, Collection de la Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2007-08, illustration of another cast p. 363

Dark brown patina. Some surface dirt in the deeper crevices and a spot of verdigris on the underside of the figure's chin, otherwise fine. This work is in excellent condition.
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Petit buste d’homme is an excellent example of Giacometti’s extraordinary efforts to distill the existential dilemmas that were sweeping across Europe in the uncertain aftermath of the World War II. This depiction of the male figure is every man, embodying and confronting the viewer with the fragility of existence. The impersonal and nonspecific facial features are connected to an almost entirely abstract body by a smooth and elongated neck, which is the focal point of this work. A bridge between mind and body, this figure’s neck recalls African tribal figures, Cycladic fertility goddesses and Ancient Greek vessels. Giacometti explained the appeal that these artistic traditions held for him when he remarked: "In time, I realized what sculpture is all about... Have you ever noticed that the truer a work is the more stylized it is? That seems strange, because style certainly does not conform to the reality of appearances, and yet the heads that come closest to resembling people I see on the street are those that are the least naturalistic—the sculptures of the Egyptians, the Chinese, the archaic Greeks, and the Sumerians" (Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, p. 136).

The mid-1940s and early 1950s proved to be a watershed period in Giacometti's artistic production. In January 1948, he was given his first one man show in fifteen years, by Pierre Matisse in his gallery in New York. Though Giacometti already had a mythical underground reputation amongst the Parisian intelligentsia, few had actually seen his recent work. This legendary exhibition showed what he had been busy experimenting with since his break from Surrealism, introduced him properly to America, and quite simply sparked the artist's meteoric rise to international fame. When his preoccupation with Surrealism waned, he turned his focus to what Jean-Paul Sartre described as Giacometti’s "search for the absolute." Sartre dismisses the expanded gestures of other sculptors who “put too much in their works” in favor of Giacometti's reductive approach. Though Giacometti knows that no part of the human body is redundant he is also aware that “space is a cancer upon being, and eats everything; to sculpt for him is to take the fat off space” (Jean-Paul Sartre, "La recerche de l'absolu," in Situations, III, Paris, 1949, translated from the French). There is much to learn about human experience from an engagement with these post-war works by Giacometti and Petit buste d’homme is certainly exemplary of the artist’s most iconic work from this pivotal period in his artistic development.