A cast of Alberto Giacometti’s seminal Grande tête de Diego is expected to garner between $30 million and $50 million at Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York on November 6, 2013. The work is part of a series of groundbreaking sculptures by Giacometti that personified the Existentialist movement during the Cold War. Grande tête de Diego, which was conceived in 1954 and cast in bronze a year later, will go on view in New York on November 1, 2013.
Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art department in New York, said, “Of all his representations of the human figure, Grande tête de Diego is perhaps Giacometti’s most radical, visually engaging and emotionally impactful.” While Giacometti’s record at auction is $103.9 million, the world record for any piece of sculpture at auction, the most recent cast of Grande tête de Diego sold for $53.3 million at Christie’s in 2010.
Giacometti’s younger brother served as the model for Grande tête de Diego, which was made following the period that saw the creation of the artist’s recognizable, elongated figures. Giacometti’s works from the 1950s tend to be more solid, often executed with the matiére pétrie, or kneading method, which lent a more expressive quality to the figures.
