Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Homme (Apollon) belongs to a series of sculptures that, in the late 1920s, would bring the work of Alberto Giacometti to the attention of the Surrealists. In 1928, a year before the creation of the present work, Giacometti’s Gazing Head had captured the eyes of André Masson and of the ‘dissident’ group of Surrealists that had gathered around Georges Bataille at the rue Blomet. From that moment onwards, Giacometti’s sculptures would evolve to embrace an abstract, geometric style nevertheless imbued with a strong evocative power that would excite the mind of the Surrealists. Echoing the post- Cubist style of Jacques Lipchitz – to whom the artist was very close at the time – and foreseeing the element of the cage, which would acquire growing importance in the years to come, Homme (Apollon) captures Giacometti’s position at the end of the 1920s, as the abstraction of his works started turning into the haunting forms of his Surreal works.