Tête au long cou

Conceived circa 1949, Tête au long cou takes inspiration from Alberto Giacometti’s most important and enduring model—his younger brother, Diego. An accomplished artist and designer in his own right, Diego was the subject for one of Alberto’s first ever sculptures when they were both teens, and continued to sit for his brother for decades, leading Alberto to describe him as “the one I know best” (quoted in L. Fritsch and F. Morris, eds., Giacometti, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2017, p. 37). Living alongside Alberto in his ramshackle rue Hippolyte-Maindron studio in Paris, Diego occupied the role of companion, confidant, and at times a crucial collaborator in his artistic process. As well as posing regularly for the artist, Diego was largely responsible for the bronze casting of Alberto’s plasters, entering the studio each morning while his brother slept in order to make a mold of the previous night’s work before the sculptor woke and felt the compulsion to destroy it. He also built the armatures that Alberto worked from, and later oversaw the patination process, bringing his brother’s artistic vision to life. As a result of their closeness and kinship, Diego’s presence infiltrated every aspect of Alberto’s oeuvre, his likeness so ingrained into the artist’s psyche that it became an intrinsic part of his work.
During the Second World War, the two brothers were separated for several years—Alberto had returned to their family home in Switzerland, while Diego remained in Paris on his own, diligently keeping watch over the artist’s studio and its contents. Alberto was filled with joy when the pair were reunited in the fall of 1945, and they returned to work almost immediately. Originally conceived in 1949, Tête au long cou is among the first works in an important group of sculptures dedicated to Diego’s likeness, in which Alberto immersed himself in studying the human form from life once again, as he sought to move away from the thin, attenuated figures that had marked his recent output. Diego’s close proximity allowed Alberto to study his brother’s form intensively, often in long, protracted sittings in the studio—this was a face the he knew intrinsically, yet one which continued to fascinate and surprise him the more he looked at it.
Seen face on, Tête au long cou appears to almost disintegrate before the eye, the head narrowing to the point that it seems to slice through the space like a disc. Yet, by contrast, when regarded from the side, the distinctive profile of Diego is fully visible, the undulating, textured surface and expansive plane of the sitter’s head and neck lending the piece an incontrovertible physicality and powerful presence. The essential characteristics of the center line of Diego’s face—his eyes, nose, mouth and chin—have been preserved, while the non-essential mass has been trimmed and cut away. The resulting sculpture teases the viewer with an inescapable dichotomy that reflects Alberto’s own experience as he confronted his sitter, concentrating on their likeness. “If I look at you face-to-face,” Alberto explained to Andre Parinaud in 1962, “I forget your profile. If I look at your profile, I forget the face…” (quoted in Alberto Giacometti: Écrits, Paris, 2007, p. 240). Alberto took this idea to the extreme in the subsequent series of sculptures of his brother which occupied him through the early 1950s, reducing Diego’s head to almost blade-like thinness. “The closer you are to something, the more condensed your perception of it,” he explained. “In this case, what was condensed for me was the width” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2017, p. 38).
Commenting on the artist’s sculptures of Diego from this period of his career, Yves Bonnefoy has noted that works such as Tête au long cou encapsulate Alberto’s desire to unite the two different experiences of looking at and interacting with the human head. “These sculpted faces compel one to face them as if one were speaking to the person,” he wrote, “meeting his eyes and thereby understanding 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… [He] demands therefore that the spectator stand in front of the sculpture as he did himself, disregarding the back and sides of his model and as bound to a face-to-face relationship as in the case of work at an easel” (op. cit., 1991, pp. 432 and 436).