Giacometti, Alberto

Giacometti, Alberto (1901–1966). Swiss sculptor, painter, and draughtsman, active mainly in Paris. He was born in the village of Borgonovo, near the Italian border, the son of the painter Giovanni Giacometti (1868–1933), whose work was influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Although he was to spend almost all his career in France, he retained great affection for Switzerland and returned regularly to visit his family. After short periods at the École des Arts et Métiers, Geneva (1919–20), and in Italy (1920–1), he moved to Paris, where he studied under Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1922 to 1925. At this time he tried to get ‘as close as I could to my vision of reality', but in 1925 he abandoned naturalism and began a period of restless experimentation. From 1930 to 1935 he took part in the Surrealist movement, developing a highly individual attenuated manner, exemplified in the open-cage construction of The Palace at 4 a.m. (MOMA, New York, 1933), made of wood, glass, wire, and string. Some of his work of this period dealt with themes of sex and violence, notably Woman with her Throat Cut, a semi-abstract bronze piece whose jagged forms brutally suggest the body of a woman who has been raped and murdered (there are casts in MOMA, New York, the NG of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and elsewhere). He abandoned Surrealism in 1935 and began to work again from the model. In 1941–4 he lived in Geneva to escape the German occupation of France, but he then returned permanently to Paris. Since 1935 most of his sculpture had been very small, but in 1946 he started working on a bigger scale and in 1947 he began evolving the style for which he became famous, characterized by human figures of extremely elongated proportions and emaciated, nervous character (Man Pointing, Tate Gallery, London, 1947).

Giacometti's gaunt figures, which were sometimes disposed in groups, were interpreted by many contemporaries as reflecting the horrors of the Second World War, specifically concentration camps. More generally, they were seen as encapsulating the fragile, essentially lonely nature of human existence. Giacometti himself refrained from making pronouncements about the meaning of his sculpture, but he was a friend of the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote on his work, notably the introduction to the catalogue of his exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1948. It was this exhibition that established Giacometti's postwar reputation, and his work soon had widespread influence, seen, for example, the ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptors who exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and in several of the entries for the competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner in 1953 (see BUTLER, REG).

By this time Giacometti was becoming regarded as one of the outstandingly original sculptors of the 20th century, and from the late 1950s his reputation as a painter also began to increase. Most of his paintings and drawings are portraits of his family and friends; his brother Diego (1902–1985), who was a skilled technician and a lifelong assistant, was a favourite model and the subject of dozens of sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Characteristically the paintings are grey in tonality, which together with their dusty-looking surfaces and the skeletal proportions of the figures often conveys a ghostly feeling. Some of them are obsessively overpainted, an expression of the doubts and anxieties Giacometti felt about his creations. He was admired not only for the quality of his work, but also for the force of his personality, his integrity, and his devotion to his art. Throughout his career in Paris he worked in the same tiny, shabby studio, and Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's companion, wrote of him: ‘Success, fame, money—Giacometti was indifferent to them all.’ Giacometti himself said: ‘Establishing yourself, furnishing a house, building up a comfortable existence, and having that menace hanging over your head all the time—no, I prefer to live in hotels, cafés, just passing through.’ There are examples of his work in many major collections, notably in the Giacometti Foundation at the Zurich Kunsthaus.