Alberto Giacometti

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Giacometti, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965 (credit: Karsh — Rapho/Photo Researchers)

(born Oct. 10, 1901, Borgonovo, Switz. — died Jan. 11, 1966, Chur) Swiss sculptor and painter. His father was a Post-Impressionist painter, and his brother Diego was a well-known furniture designer. After studying art in Geneva (1919 – 20) and Paris (1922 – 25), he developed a style related to the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko and the post-Cubist work of Jacques Lipchitz. His work also showed the influence of African and Oceanic art. After experimenting with abstraction in the 1930s, he became increasingly focused on finding ways to capture a sense of reality in sculpture. For Giacometti an artwork was to become an almost existential evocation of reality. By the 1940s he had developed his signature style, producing thin, attenuated sculptures of solitary, skeletal figures and heads. He became well known, especially in the U.S., through two exhibitions in New York City (1948, 1950) and an essay on his art by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1963 he designed a stage set for a production of a Samuel Beckett play.

For more information on Alberto Giacometti, visit Britannica.com.

(b Borgonovo, nr Stampa, 10 Oct 1901; d Chur, 11 Jan 1966). Sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker, son of (1) Giovanni Giacometti.

He began drawing around 1910-12, followed by painting and sculpting in 1913-15. While at secondary school in Schiers, near Chur (1914-19), he developed his drawing style primarily through portraiture. In 1919-20 in Geneva he studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and sculpture at the Ecole des Arts et M?tiers but was more impressed by subsequent visits to Italy (1920-21), where he worked without formal instruction. In sculpture he worked in an academic mode, while in painting he emulated his father's Post-Impressionist and Fauvist style, which he thoroughly mastered by late 1921, as in Self-portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Consequently in January 1922 he began studying sculpture in Paris under Emile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Acad?mie de la Grande Chaumi?re, where he continued intermittently for five years. In 1925 he ceased drawing and painting to concentrate on sculpture, and his brother (4) Diego Giacometti joined him in Paris. In 1927 they moved into the studio at 46, Rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse, where Alberto worked for the rest of his life, with annual visits to his family in Switzerland.

Part of the Giacometti family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The recurring themes of the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) are time, movement, and transparence. He is best known for his elongated figural structures.

The son of a painter, Alberto Giacometti was born in Stampa on Oct. 10, 1901. He began to draw and model at an early age, and in 1919 he enrolled at the École des Arts-et-Métiers in Geneva. He traveled in Italy in 1920-1921. He studied with the sculptor Émile Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris from 1922 to 1925. After sharing a studio in Paris with his brother Diego from 1925 to 1927, Giacometti set up on his own.

Giacometti's early work derived from cubist (Torso, 1925), African, and Cycladic sculpture (Spoon Woman, 1926). But by 1928 he began to develop a personal treatment of the medium, moving to more original ideas - in part a result of his meeting that year with the surrealists, with whom he later became affiliated. In his Man and Reclining Woman Who Dreams (both 1929) he created open structures concerned principally with establishing a viable language of form and solving the technical difficulties of armature and support.

Giacometti occasionally returned to figural themes in the 1930s and early 1940s, as in Nude, Femme qui marche (1933-1934), the first of the elongated torsos, and Womanwith Chariot I (1942-1943). The latter work, evocative and immobile, is an extension of the expressive qualities stated in the major work of this period: the surrealist constructions of 1929 to 1945.

These constructions imply or state movement - Suspended Ball (1930-1931) and the Captured Hand (1932) - and sometimes border on the fantastic, as in the well-known Palace at 4 A.M. (1932-1933). They are quasirealistic, as in the Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), and at times allusive, as in the Project for a Passage (1932). In Hands Holding the Void (1934) Giacometti brought together the figural and the fantastic and prefigured the metaphysics articulated in his postwar work.

Giacometti lived in Switzerland from 1942 until 1945, when he returned to Paris. In Switzerland he met Annette Arm, who became his wife.

Giacometti's work after 1945 was almost exclusively figural, ranging from numerous portraits of his brother and his wife to sculptures of the anonymous and universal man, pointing, standing, or walking. He found a new means of modeling and painting. In his sculpture small, anonymous patches are laid over a skeletal structure; in his paintings he used short nervous lines and monochromatic low-keyed hues. In both mediums he employed elongated proportions, either in individual parts of the figure or throughout the body as a whole.

Giacometti's compositions narrowed down to four themes: one person in an environment, as in Walking Quietly under the Rain (1949), or several people encountering each other, as in City Square (1948); single figures gesturing, such as the Man Pointing (1947); figures placed atop a pedestal or support, such as Chariot (1950); and single, gazing portraits that concentrate on the head, as in Portrait of Diego (1954) and Monumental Head (1960). Regarding this last theme, Giacometti once remarked that "all the rest of the head is a prop for the gaze." He died in Chur, Switzerland, on Jan. 12, 1966.

Further Reading

The most recent and thorough monograph on Giacometti is David Sylvester, Alberto Giacometti (1965). Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti (1965), the exhibition catalog for the Museum of Modern Art, is short but useful. The most profound interpretation of Giacometti's imagery can be found in two essays of Jean Paul Sartre, "The Quest for the Absolute" (1948) and "The Paintings of Giacometti" (1954), both translated into English and published in Sartre's Essays in Aesthetics (1964). For another interpretation see Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti (trans. 1963).

Additional Sources

Juliet, Charles, Giacometti, Paris: Hazan, 1985.

Lord, James, Giacometti, a biography, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985.

Giacometti, Alberto (1901-66). Swiss-born sculptor who rethought the sculpted human figure (as skeletal transparency, not mass). Expelled from the Surrealist group in 1935 when he returned to working from nature, he battled by various routes (minute observation, memory, copying the art of the past) to reproduce reality and to capture movement. In his sculptures, paintings, and drawings (including portraits of writers) Giacometti was absorbed by the relation of the figure to the surrounding space, or le vide. Sartre introduced him to Genet: both wrote illuminatingly about what Giacometti's work signified in post-war French experience. Sartre divined how the figures are seen—even close to—in distant perspective. Éluard dedicated ‘Marines’ (1941) to him; Ponge and Bonnefoy also empathized with his work.

[Helen Beale]

Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Born	October 10, 1901(1901-10-10) Borgonovo, Stampa, Switzerland
Died	January 11, 1966 (aged 64) Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Field	Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
Training	The School of Fine Arts, Geneva
Movement	Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism, Formalism
Awards	"Grand Prize for Sculpture" at 1962 Venice Biennale

Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901 – January 11, 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Alberto Giacometti was born in October 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background - his father, Giovanni, was a well known Post-Impressionist painter. Alberto was the eldest of four children and was always especially close to the brother nearest to him in age, Diego. From the beginning, he was interested in art.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Later years 2 Artistic analysis 3 Legacy 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

Biography

"Woman of Venice II", 1956, painted bronze sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Early life

Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, now part of the Swiss municipality of Stampa, near the Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a painter. Alberto attended the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus.

Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model's gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out; their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife." After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result represented the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman.

His paintings underwent a parallel procedure. The figures appear isolated, are severely attenuated, and are the result of continuous reworking. Subjects were frequently revisited: one of his favorite models was his younger brother Diego Giacometti.^[1] A third brother Bruno Giacometti is a Swiss architect.

Later years

In 1962, he was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the award brought with it worldwide fame. Even when he had achieved popularity and his work was in demand, he still reworked models, often destroying them or setting them aside to be returned to years later. The prints produced by Giacometti are often overlooked but the catalogue raisonné, Giacometti - The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), comments on their impact and gives details of the number of copies of each print. Some of his most important images were in editions of only 30 and many were described as rare in 1970.

"Woman with Her Throat Cut", 1932 (cast 1949), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In his later years Giacometti's works were shown in a number of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Riding a wave of international popularity, and despite his declining health, he traveled to the United States in 1965 for an exhibition of his works at the New York Museum of Modern Art. As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had lived.

Giacometti died in 1966 of heart disease (pericarditis) and chronic bronchitis at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was interred close to his parents. In May 2007 the executor of his widow's estate, French foreign minister Roland Dumas, was convicted of illegally selling Giacometti's works to a top auctioneer. The auctioneer, Jacques Tajan, was also convicted. Both were ordered to pay €850,000 to the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation. ^[2]

Artistic analysis

"Cat", 1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giacometti was a key player in the Surrealist Movement, but his work resists easy categorization. Some describe it as formalist, others argue it is expressionist or otherwise having to do with what Deleuze calls 'blocs of sensation' (as in Deleuze's analysis of Francis Bacon). Even after his excommunication from the Surrealist group, while the intention of his sculpting was usually imitation, the end products were an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He attempted to create renditions of his models the way he saw them, and the way he thought they ought to be seen. He once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast." His figures resembled the way he looked upon himself.

Scholar William Barrett in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962), argues that the attenuated forms of Giacometti's figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism that modern life is increasingly devoid of meaning and empty. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life."

Legacy

His work is in numerous public collections, including the Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain, in Britain, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. He created the monument on the grave of Gerda Taro at Père Lachaise Cemetery.^[3] In 2001 he was included in the Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000 exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In November 2000 "Grande Femme Debout I" by Giacometti sold for $14.3 million.^[4] Giacometti's bronze "Grande Femme Debout II" was bought by the Gagosian Art Gallery for $27.4 million at Christie's auction in New York City on May 6, 2008.^[5] Giacometti and his sculpture Three Men Walking appear on the current 100 Swiss Franc banknote.

Notes

1. ^ Tate Collection: Seated Man by Alberto Giacometti Retrieved July 13, 2007.
2. ^ Conviction Upheld Against Former French FM in Giacometti Fraud, May 10, 2007, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25058/conviction-upheld-against-former-french-fm-in-giacometti-fraud/, retrieved 2008-04-16 
3. ^ Robert Whelan, "Robert Capa, the definitive collection", p8, Phaidon press 2001 ISBN 978-0-7148-4449-7
4. ^ Art record Picasso painting goes for £38m at auction | World news | The Guardian
5. ^ Afp.google.com, Monet fetches record price at New York auction

References

• Jacques Dupin (1962) "Alberto Giacometti", Paris, Maeght
• Reinhold Hohl (1971) "Alberto Giacometti", Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje
• Die Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung (1990), Zürich, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft
• Alberto Giacometti. Sculptures - peintures - dessins. Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991-92.
• Jean Soldini (1993) "Alberto Giacometti. Le colossal, la mère, le sacré", Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme
• David Sylvester (1996) Looking at Giacometti, Henry Holt & Co.
• Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966. Kunsthalle Wien, 1996
• James Lord (1997) Giacometti: A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux* Alberto Giacometti. Kunsthaus Zürich, 2001; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2001-2002.
• Yves Bonnefoy (2006) Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, New edition, Flammarion

External links

• Alberto Giacometti in the SIKART dictionary and database
• Works of Alberto Giacometti:
  • The UNESCO Works of Art Collection
  • Museum of Modern Art
  • smARThistory: Giacometti's City Square
• Life of Alberto Giacometti:
  • Chronology of his life with illustrations from the Museum of Modern Art
• Exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich from 27 February until 24 May 2009

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