Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in the mountain hamlet of Borgonovo in eastern Switzerland. He was the first of four children to post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti and Annetta Giacometti-Stampa, whose family were among the region's leading landowners. In addition to his father, several members of Giacometti's extended family were artists, including Augusto Giacometti (Giovanni and Annetta's second cousin), a Symbolist painter, and a close family friend, Cuno Amiet, who was Alberto's godfather and Fauvist. Giacometti began sending pencil and crayon drawings to his godfather Amiet around that time, many of which he has saved and survived today. And he began experimenting with oils and still lifes, often using his siblings as models. He made his first painting at the age of twelve.

In 1915, Giacometti enrolled at the Evangelical School in the town of Schiers, where he continued to work in a small private studio. He then enrolled at the École des Arts Industries in Geneva and studied painting, drawing and sculpture under the tutelage of Pointillist painter David Estoppey and sculptor Maurice Sarkissoff.

In May 1920 Giacometti traveled with his father to Italy, where he studied paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto at the Venice Biennale, Giotto's frescoes in Padua, and ancient Egyptian art at the Archaeological Museum in Florence. He soon moved to Paris, where he enrolled in various art classes, and later became interested in Cubism and primitive art. In 1926 he exhibited his first major bronze sculpture work, the idol-like Spoon Woman (1926-27), at the Salon des Tuileries.

By the 1930s, Giacometti was warmly received in Surrealist circles and became close to the movement's founders, André Breton and Louis Aragon, as well as Man Ray, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Max Ernst. But he also published his work in Documents, the periodical produced by the writer Georges Bataille, who at the time posited a version of Surrealism against Breton's. Critics now believe that Bataille's ideas may have been important in inspiring several of Giacometti's Surrealist works, such as Suspended Ball (1930-1).

In 1946, after the liberation of Paris and Giacometti's three-year hiatus in Geneva, he returned to the French capital. That same year, his ex-girlfriend Annette Arm joined him, and the two were married in 1949. Arm has modeled for her many times, including for her oil painting Annette with Chariot (1950). While living in Paris during these years, Giacometti reached his mature style of tall figures after spending time drawing passersby on the streets of the city.

As Giacometti's style continued to mature in the 1950s and '60s, his bronze figures became larger and more complex, from the nearly four-foot-tall Woman of Venice II (1956) to the nearly four-foot Tall Woman II (1960). ) stretched all the way back to Tall Woman (1960), which rose close to nine. He also devoted more time to portraiture in both painting and sculpture. Among her regular models was Japanese philosophy professor and author Isaku Yanaihara, whom she befriended in 1955 with Diego and Annette.

In the 1960s, Giacometti had an international reputation, but his health declined. He was struggling with heart and circulation problems. He continued to work, however, and in his last weeks was working on a bust and painting by French photographer and close friend Elie Lotar. He died of complications of pericarditis on the evening of January 11, 1966.

Both important phases of Giacometti's career led to innovations that influenced a wide variety of artists. For example, Surrealist sculpture in the 1930s influenced Henry Moore and in part inspired Surrealism, which would become a crucial component of Moore's lifelong practice. It is certainly hard to imagine Moore's own innovative experiments in the 1930s without Giacometti's example. And Giacometti's figurative work was vital in reconstructing the figure as a viable motif in the post-war era, in an era dominated by abstract art. Pierced and fragile, their feeble bronze figures appearing compressed in space are in many ways visual manifestations of Existential thought, emblems of the suspiciously devastated state of modern humanity.