Alberto Giacometti, born October 10, 1901, in Borgonovo, Switzerland, is the sculptor and painter, best known for his attenuated sculptures of solitary figures. His work has been compared to that of the existentialists in literature.
Giacometti displayed precocious talent and was much encouraged by his father, Giovanni, a Post-Impressionist painter, and by his godfather, Cuno Amiet, a Fauvist painter. He spent a happy childhood in the village of Stampa, to which he returned regularly until his death. He grew up among brothers who also showed a penchant for the arts. His brother Diego became known as a furniture designer and served as Giacometti’s model and aide. Another brother, Bruno, became an architect.
Giacometti left secondary school in Schiers in 1919 and then went to Geneva, where he attended art classes during the winter of 1919–20. After a time in Venice and Padua (May 1920), he went to Florence and Rome (fall 1920–summer 1921), where he encountered rich collections of Egyptian art. The stylized and fixed, yet striding, figures with their steady gazes proved to have a lasting impact on his art.
Between 1922 and 1925 Giacometti studied at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris. Although he owed much to his teacher, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, his style was very different. It was related to the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and to the Post-Cubist sculpture of Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz. In Torso (1925), for example, Giacometti merged the Classical tradition with the avant-garde and reduced the human body to a grouping of geometric shapes which, together, capture the contrapposto posture. He was also inspired by African and Oceanic art—as in The Spoon-Woman (1926), in which the figure’s torso takes on the shape of a ceremonial spoon. It was his flat slablike sculptures, however, such as Observing Head (1927/28), that soon made him popular among the Paris avant-garde.
Having abandoned any resemblance to realism in his work during the period 1925–29, he continued the abstraction trend in the period 1930–32, but he began working in a distinctly Surrealist fashion as well, attempting to express unconscious desires in erotically charged works such as Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 A.M. In 1933–34, still working with Surrealism, Giacometti—whose beloved father had died in 1933—attempted metaphorical compositions using the themes of life and death in Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) and 1 + 1 = 3. Giacometti lamented that his serious works of art had as little reference to reality as the merely decorative vases and lamps that he made to earn a living. Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934), with its clear, though stylized, female form, already shows his interest in moving toward realism. After an acrimonious break with the Surrealist group in 1935, he began to work after nature again. What had started as mere studies became a lifelong pursuit: the phenomenological approach to reality—that is, the search for the given reality in what one sees when one is looking at a person.
In June 1940, to escape the Nazi invasion, Giacometti and his brother Diego left Paris by bicycle and traveled to the south of France. They stayed there briefly and returned to Paris only to flee again in 1941 to Geneva, where they remained until 1946. During that tumultuous time, Giacometti arrived at matchstick-sized, coarsely textured sculptures of figures and heads that are so small that they appear far away in space. About 1947 he began to express his massless, weightless image of reality in a skeletal style, with figures thin as beanstalks. His new style projected an air of despair and loneliness. The frail scarred bodies he created reflected those of the survivors living in postwar Paris. Suddenly, Giacometti enjoyed a rapid rise to fame, especially in the United States, through two exhibitions (1948 and 1950) at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City and an essay on his art by the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the artist and his work within the context of the existentialist worldview.
Giacometti continued to question his artistic path and search for ways to challenge—or equal—reality in sculpture as well as in painting. For him an artwork was to become an almost magical evocation of reality in an imaginary space, as in heads of Diego and figures after his wife Annette (1952–58), executed like apparitions as both paintings and sculptures. His portraits of Caroline or Elie Lotar, his models and friends in the last years (1958–65), are heads and busts gazing intently and made only with lines of force, without contour lines or surfaces. At that point he felt that reality was no longer dependent on being perceived by someone; reality simply was. Like the characters in Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays, Giacometti’s figures represented an isolated, highly individualistic worldview. In 1961 Beckett, his longtime friend and confidant, asked Giacometti to design a set for his absurdist drama Waiting for Godot (published 1953). The final design consisted of a single plaster tree.
Giacometti was one of the outstanding artists of the 20th century. At a time when avant-garde artists aimed at rendering nonfigurative or expressive qualities rather than achieving resemblance to reality, he worked for the unattainable goal of equaling reality by rendering a portrait—whether drawing, painting, or sculpture—so that it would be perceived by the spectator with the impact it would have were it a living person. To do this he introduced into the art of sculpture a new concept of rendering distance. Massless and weightless, his figures and heads are immediately seen from a specific frontal point of view and therefore perceived as situated in distance and space. Giacometti had such intellectual integrity—for example, living in a shabby studio in Montparnasse even after fame and fortune had reached him—that he became for his contemporaries, especially those of the postwar generation, an almost legendary figure during his lifetime.
Reinhold D. Hohl
Source: Britannica
A YOUTH SPENT IN A STUDIO
Alberto Giacometti grew up in Switzerland in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley, a few kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933) was an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and artists. He shared his thoughts with his son on art and the nature of art.
Alberto Giacometti produced his first oil painting Still Life with Apples, circa 1915 and first sculpted bust Diego, circa 1914-1915 in his father’s studioat the age of fourteen. His father and his godfather, the Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet(1868-1961) were two crucial figures in young Alberto’s artistic development. In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study, enrolling in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he attended classes given by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Drawings of nudes attest both to this apprenticeship and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, to the influence of Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Léger.
THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARTS OF AFRICA AND OCEANIA
Giacometti’s work shows the influence of African and Oceanian sculpture. When the young artist developed an interest in African art in 1926, it was no longer a novelty for the modern artists of the previous generation (Picasso, Derain); it had even become popularized to the point of becoming decorative.
The two works which first brought Giacometti to the attention of the public were the Spoon Woman and The Couple, both shown in 1927 at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris, and both illustrating the upheaval created in the young artist by that cultural encounter. In 1928, Giacometti embarked on a series of women and flat heads, whose novel quality earned him acclaim in 1929, and resulted in his first contract with the Pierre Loeb gallery, which exhibited the Surrealists. In those years, Giacometti was friends with Carl Einstein, author of the seminal book on African sculpture, Negerplastik (1915) and Michel Leiris, who would become a specialist in Dogon art. Several later works, including some outstanding painted plasters and one or two paintings, show how non-western art had a lasting influence on his output. The artist moved away from naturalist and academic representation, in favour of a totemic and at times wild vision of the figure, filled with a magical power.
OBJECTS
The creation of decorative art objects shows Giacometti’s interest in utilitarian objects which he admired in ancient and primitive societies. In 1931, Giacometti created a new typology of sculptures, which he called “mobile and mute objects” – things moving in a latent, suggestive way, which he had made of wood by a carpenter.
Like the Disagreeable Object and the Disagreeable Object To Be Thrown Away To Be Thrown Away, the Suspended Ball established a bridge between object and sculpture, and challenged the actual status of the work of art. In some of these sculptures, Giacometti had recourse, for the first time, to the procedure of the “cage”, which enabled him to delimit a dreamlike space of representation. From 1930 on, Giacometti created many utilitarian objects: lamps, vases, and wall lights which were sold by the avant-garde interior decorator Jean-Michel Frank. He also designed plaster and terra cotta bas-reliefs for special commissions – those on view here were made for an American collector, and the Louis-Dreyfus mansion in Paris. In 1939, he was one of the artists approached for a major commission by a couple of Argentinian collectors for whom he designed fire places, chandeliers, and console tables. Just before being dispatched to Buenos Aires, the complete décor, coordinated by Jean-Michel Frank, was installed in a life-size model in Paris. After the war, Giacometti went on creating other objects, including, in 1950, a lamp inspired by Dogon statuary and Egyptian funerary objects, and, in 1959, a scarf for a commission from his gallerist Aimé Maeght.
THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENT
Giacometti joined André Breton’s Surrealist movement in 1931, as an active member of Breton’s group, Giacometti in no time stood out as one of its rare sculptors. Despite his being expelled in February 1935, surrealist procedures continued to play an important part in his creative work: dreamlike visions, montage and assemblage, objects with metaphorical functions, and magical treatment of the figure.
The Gazing Head, caught the attention of the group in 1929, and the Walking Woman of 1932, conceived as a model for the major Surrealist exhibition of 1933, in the version with neither arms nor head, featured in the 1936 Surrealist show in London. A painted version of the set construction titled The Palace at 4 a.m. conjures up the theatrical aspect of his dreamlike world. When, in 1965, Giacometti created a final version of the Suspended Ball for a retrospective in London, and by also providing a painted version of it, the artist showed how his links with the movement lived on.
WHAT IS A HEAD ?
The issue of the human head was the central subject of Giacometti’s research throughout his life, as well as the reason for his exclusion of the Surrealist group in 1935. In that year, the representation of a head, which seemed to be a common-or-garden subject, was, for him, far from being resolved. The head and, above all, the eyes are the core of the human being and of life, whose mystery fascinated him.
After the Head-Skull of 1934, developed after the death of his father Giovanni in 1933, his many different variations on heads show that the subject was inexhaustible, and all the more so if it was combined with the question of scale: for Giacometti, coming up with an exact rendering of his vision also meant providing the distance with which the subject had been looked at.
In the 1930s, the models for his research into the head were his brother, Diego, an English artist friend, Isabel (Delmer), and a professional model, Rita (Gueyfier). Glimpsed from afar in the Quartier Latin, Isabel was the subject of one his very earliest miniature figurines. After his return to Paris from Switzerland in 1945, Giacometti once again showed that monumentality was separate from size, by making small-format portraits of important personalities: the patron of the arts Marie-Laure de Noailles, the writer Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had met in 1941, and, at Aragon’s request, the Resistance hero Rol-Tanguy.
A WOMAN LIKE A TREE, A HEAD LIKE A STONE
It was in Switzerland, where Giacometti spent the Second World War, that he had the idea in 1944-45 for the sculpture which would be the prototype for his postwar standing figures: the Woman with Chariot, which depicts the image of his English friend Isabel from memory.
The sculpture of a standing figure, facing forward with her arms beside her body and her face expressionless, is a fine example of Giacometti’s research between 1945 and 1965 involving the space of representation: the figures were either set on pedestals which isolated them from the ground, or incorporated in “cages” forming a virtual space. Some compositions like The Glade were placed on flat surfaces raised above pedestal level – here, too, it was a matter of establishing a space parallel to ours. The standing female figures are allusive silhouettes, sometimes reduced to a line, and invariably approached by way of successive phases conveyed by series.
The Four Women on a Base and Four Figurines on a Stand materialize two visions involving four standing women seen from a distance, and in different circumstances. With the Three Men Walking Giacometti tried to grasp in sculpture the fleeting sight of figures in motion. In 1950, Giacometti produced a series of sculptures conveying the image of a clearing where the trees were women and the stones men’s heads – an image which he would later push to its extreme, in a life-size piece.
FRAGMENTS AND VISIONS
Giacometti’s work studies the part as an evocation of the whole, and the emergence of a vision in the spectator’s space. In 1921 and 1946, Giacometti witnessed two deaths which left him with an indelible memory.
At the bedside of the first dying person he was fascinated by his nose which seemed to him to grow longer as life ebbed away. In front of the corpse of the second person, he remembered the head tipped backwards, the open mouth, the skeletal limbs, and the terror felt at the idea that the dead was everywhere and that its hand might pass through the walls and reach him. Pursued by visions of heads suspended in the void, he strove to convey them in sculpture.
He had been fascinated since boyhood by the human gaze, and the impression that life lies in the eyes was now heightened. Talking about those years, he declared: “I cannot simultaneously see the eyes, the hands, and the feet of a person standing two or three yards in front of me, but the only part that I do look at entails a sensation of the existence of everything.”
ENCOUNTERS
Giacometti met philosopher Jean-Paul Startre in 1941, who is the author of two essential essays about the artist’s work, published in 1948 and 1954, dealing with the issue of perception.
Just as significant were his conversations with Sartre’s Japanese translator, Isaku Yanaihara, a professor of philosophy, who posed for Giacometti between 1956 to 1961. In 1948, keen to honour French intellectuals and artists, the French state commissioned Giacometti to design a medal dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre; the medal was never actually made, but there are drawings for it.
Between 1951 and his death, Giacometti produced a series of “dark heads”, which, together with some anonymous sculpted heads, lent substance to the “generic” man concept, which Sartre would sum up, in 1964, in his novel Les mots, with the sentence: “A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him”. This was Giacometti’s quintessential contribution to the history of the portrait in the 20th century.
PORTRAITS
Giacometti’s portraits, be they painted or sculpted, are the translation of the model as an implacable otherness, which can never be grasped in its entirety. These portraits, devoid of all emotion and expression, are the receptacle of what the spectator brings to them. What was involved for the artist was capturing and rendering the vibration of the life of his models and not their psychology. Under Giacometti’s brush, his mother’s cook, Rita, became a sacerdotal character relieved of any sociological context.
His favourite models were people who lived around him: his wife Annette, whom he married in 1949, and Diego, his brother and assistant, who acted as a medium for his most advanced research. Working from memory, he brought forth their image within an imaginary space. Working from models, he turned his back on classical perspective and reconstructed his models posing as he saw them – in their fragmented or deformed, but ever-changing, aspect. Their distinctive features dissolved and sometimes merged, or were reduced to essentials. Giacometti also painted occasional models, as long as they agreed to pose for hours in front of him: the English industrialist and collector Sir Robert Sainsbury, the sophisticated intellectual Paola Carola-Thorel, and the artist Pierre Josse. Every modelling session gave rise to a new sequence of perceptions, which the artist sought to build up with his brush. Caroline, a pretty woman with a complex personality who hung out with criminals and posed from 1960 onwards, was presented in three very different aspects: a remote goddess, a dangerous and totemic figure, and a sculptural beauty.
LANDSCAPES
Giacometti creates a system of equivalences between the human figure and nature: the busts are mountains, the standing figures are trees, the heads are stones. In the sunlight, the mountain vibrates with a throb which resembles breathing. Like the tree, the human being is caught in a process of growth and death which can never be halted.
This theme adorns the door which Giacometti finished making in 1956 for the vault of the Kaufmann family in Pennsylvania (United States). In 1958, gripped by a nighttime vision, he hurriedly painted a picture which brought together that trilogy: man, tree and mountain. For Giacometti, however, it was above all the most ordinary which contained the unknown and the wonderful. He observed that the landscape he painted from his studio window in Stampa was forever changing, and that he could “spend every day looking at the same garden, the same trees, and the same backdrop”, or, in Paris, remain in front of the small house, on the other side of the street, which he painted from his door. He was amazed by “all the beautiful landscapes to be painted without changing places, the most ordinary, anonymous, banal and beautiful landscape you could ever see.”
THE LAST MODEL
Eli Lotar, a film-maker and photographer, was Giacometti’s last male model. Lotar, a had been part of the Surrealist avant-garde in the 1930s. In the postwar years, he was dogged by failure and became destitute; he lived off the generosity of old friends like Giacometti, who gave him money in exchange for running small errands and posing.
Giorgio Soavi has described these sessions, where Lotar had to remain absolutely still, as follows: “[Giacometti’s] eye was filled with strange gleams, his body vibrated in every limb, all he followed were the impulses which governed his hands, his arms, and his legs: he was in ecstasy. As I looked closely at the two faces, I understood the secret which enabled Lotar not to breathe: if Eli was the ideal model for that sculpture, it was because he was dead. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t think, he remained focused on the highest point. An electric current connected the artist to the model, wrapping them in a real complicity. They played together, without any ball, racket, or net.” In these sculptures, which evoke the reliquary and Egyptian statuary, the man who became a tramp was given the dignity of a priest. Jean Genet noted that, for Giacometti, women were goddesses and men priests “belonging to a very senior clergy”, all of them depending “invariably on the same haughty and gloomy family. Familiar and very close. Inaccessible.”
Source: fondation giacometti
Sila Blume 
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