Buste d'homme sur socle

The late 1940s was a pivotal period in the development of Alberto Giacometti’s oeuvre, as he expanded and solidified his mature artistic vision. At the beginning of the decade, the scale of the artist’s sculptures had dramatically reduced, leading him to create increasingly diminutive figures, sometimes no taller than a few inches high. As a result, by the time he returned to Paris at the end of the Second World War, the entirety of his surviving wartime production reportedly fit into several matchboxes, which the artist carried with him from Switzerland in the pockets of his overcoat. Determined to begin moving in the opposite direction, Giacometti sought different approaches to expanding and enlarging his sculptural explorations of the human figure through the ensuing years – while some works grew taller and thinner, others involved placing figurative forms atop a monumental base that served as a contrasting counterweight to their proportions.

Conceived circa 1947, Buste d’homme sur socle exemplifies the latter of these two sculptural strategies, paring a refined, compact male bust with a weighty, rectangular block. The base acts as a powerful anchor for the sculpture, its geometric form finished in a roughly-hewn texture that echoes the rippling, highly-worked surface of the figure. Photographs of the artist’s studio from this period demonstrate how this dynamic visual device captured Giacometti’s imagination – on a worktable, a myriad of plasters are shown in-progress, each one using different variations of the idea, from double, stepped plinths, to thin, towering monoliths. In the present work, the two are united and treated as a single entity, granting the figure a rich sense of monumentality and volumetric presence.

In Buste d’homme sur socle, Giacometti provides only a partial view of his figure, reducing the man’s torso to a thin column of rugged form, drawing our focus upwards to his head, where his facial features are deftly indicated through the delicate manipulations of the material. The artist eschews the precise details of the figure’s likeness in favour of a more abstracted impression of his physicality, his strong shoulders, upright posture and slightly elongated neck vividly conveying a sense of character and poise. In this way, the work fulfils Giacometti’s ongoing quest to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place within the viewer’s mind when they see a figure in passing, or from afar. ‘I try to give a head its right dimension,’ he explained, ‘its true size, such as we see when we try to grasp its total appearance at a glance… What strikes us in its look requires a certain distance’ (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, trans. J. Stewart, Paris, 1991, pp. 273-274).

This artistic concept had its roots in a powerful revelation Giacometti experienced shortly after his return to Paris in 1945, following a trip to the cinema. Sitting in the darkened theatre, he suddenly became aware of the difference between the images conveyed in black and white on the screen and those experienced in real life, a sensation that intensified once he emerged into the busy light-filled street. ‘I remember very clearly coming out on to the Boulevard du Montparnasse and seeing the Boulevard as I had never seen it before,’ he later recalled. ‘Everything was different: depth, objects, colours and the silence… Everything seemed different to me and completely new’ (quoted in M. Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, exh. cat., New Haven & London, 2001, p. 7). This profound experience prompted Giacometti to begin experimenting and exploring new directions in his art, rooting his sculptures in close, direct observation, in order to convey the very act of perception at work.