Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss painter, sculptor, draftsman and printmaker, who was best known for his thin, elongated bronze figures. Seemingly lost in the space around them, the sculptures embody the artist's feeling of man's isolation and alienation from his environment. In addition to his sculpture, Giacometti also created oil paintings and drawings.
Background
Alberto Giacometti was born on October 10, 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland. He was a son of Giovanni Giacometti, a well-known post-Impressionist painter, and Annetta Giacometti-Stampa. His brother, Diego, became known as a furniture designer and sculptor, and served as Giacometti’s model and aide. Another brother, Bruno, became an architect.
Education
Giacometti left secondary school in 1919. He began to draw and model at an early age, and in 1919 he enrolled at the École des Arts Industriels in Geneva. The painter also studied under the tutelage of the sculptor Émile Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris during the period from 1922 to 1925.
In 1927, Alberto moved into a studio with his brother, Diego, his lifelong companion and assistant, and exhibited his sculpture for the first time at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris. The same year, his first show in Switzerland was held at the Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. The following year, Giacometti met André Masson, and by 1930, he became a participant in the Surrealist circle, where he remained until 1934.
In 1932, Alberto held his first solo show at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris. During the early 1940s, he befriended Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1942, he settled down in Geneva, where he started to collaborate with the publisher Albert Skira. Four years later, Giacometti returned to Paris. During that time, he started to make coarsely textured sculptures of figures and heads.
Approximately in 1947, he began to express his massless, weightless image of reality in a skeletal style, with figures thin as beanstalks. Alberto's new style projected an air of despair and loneliness. The frail scarred bodies, that 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 and an essay on his art by the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the painter and his work within the context of the existentialist worldview.
In 1958, Giacometti was commissionned to create a monumental sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York. His work on the project resulted in the four figures of standing women, his largest sculptures, entitled "Grande femme debout I through IV" (1960). However, Alberto didn't finish the work, because he was unsatisfied with the relationship between the sculpture and the site, and abandoned the project.
As Giacometti's style continued to mature during the 1950s and 1960s, his bronze figures grew larger and more complex, ranging from his "Woman of Venice II" (1956) to "Tall Woman II" (1960). By the 1960s, Giacometti became a well-known painter and sculptor, but his health declined. Nevertheless, he continued to work and in his final weeks, he was working on a bust and painting of Elie Lotar, a French photographer and close friend of him.
Quotations:
"It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see."
"Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it."
"In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it."
"If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all."