alberto giacometti

Career

Early years

Though born in Borgonovo in Val Bregaglia, Switzerland near the Italian border, Alberto Giacometti spent most of his childhood in the nearby town of Stampa. His father was a Post-Impressionist who encouraged his son's interest in sculpture.

After finishing high school, Giacometti moved to Geneva to attend the School of Fine Arts. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse under Auguste Rodin's associate, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. It was there that Giacometti experimented with the cubist method.

In 1927 his brother, Diego Giacometti, joined him as his assistant. Drawn to the surrealist movement, Alberto displayed his first surrealist sculptures at Salon des Tuileries, Paris, later that year. Before long, he was regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors of the day.

Living in the creative community of Montparnasse, he associated with artists Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus, plus writers Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and André Breton, and wrote and drew for Breton's magazine Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution.

From 1935 to 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.

During World War II, he lived in the safety of Geneva where he met Annette Arm. In 1946 he and Arm returned to Paris where in 1949 they married. Giacometti's most productive period followed the marriage. His wife provided him with the opportunity to constantly to be in touch with another human body, particularly a feminine one. Models who had posed for him found it a difficult job, but Arm patiently sat for him for hours until he achieved what he wanted.

He soon had an exhibition of his works at the Gallery Maeght in Paris and at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City for which his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote the catalogue's preface.

By the early 1950s, the use of bronze had become affordable (metals were in short supply during World War II) and Giacometti began to cast his works in bronze with the help of his brother Diego, who posed for the artist and worked as his assistant until Giacometti's death.

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 naked woman.

Commissioned to design a medallion depicting Henri Matisse in 1954, he created numerous masterful drawings of the great painter in the last months of Matisse's life. His portraiture of the 1950s shows a greater emphasis on recognizable likeness.

Later years

In 1962, he was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the award brought with it worldwide celebrity. Even when he had achieved popularity and his works were 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.

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.

Alberto Giacometti died in 1966 of heart disease 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. He is featured on the one hundred Swiss Franks banknote.

Artistic analysis

Giacometti was a key player in the Existentialist 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. 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." Giacometti Sculptures, Tudor Publishing, NY, 1964

Legacy

In 2001 he was included in the Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000 exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Before 2005, a sculpture by Giacometti sold for as much as $14 million.He looks like a cross between Ali G creation Borat and Professor Robert Winston