Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti, (born Oct. 10, 1901, Borgonovo,
Switz.—died Jan. 11, 1966, Chur), Swiss sculptor and
painter, best known for his attenuated sculptures of
solitary figures. Notable works include “Head of a Man on a
Rod” (1947) and “Composition with Seven Figures and a Head
(The Forest)” (1950). His work has been compared to that of
the existentialists in literature; in 1963 Giacometti
designed the set for Samuel Beckett’s drama Waiting for
Godot.
Giacometti displayed precocious talent and
was much encouraged by his father, Giovanni, a
Postimpressionist painter, and by his godfather, Cuno Amiet,
a Fauvist painter. He spent a happy childhood in the nearby
village of Stampa, to which he returned regularly until his
death. His brother Diego became known as a furniture
designer and shared Giacometti’s life as his 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 rich collections of Egyptian
art taught him that the impact of ancient and primitive
hieratic styles—which adhere to fixed, conventional types
and frontal or rigid figures—could be used as an equivalent
for the force of reality.
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. An example is “Torso” (1925). He was also inspired
by African and Oceanic art, as in “The Spoon-Woman” (1926).
His first important personal achievements were flat,
slablike sculptures, such as “Observing Head” (1927/28),
which soon made him popular among the Paris avant-garde.
Any resemblance to reality had been
abandoned in the period 1925–29, when he created mannered
figures, such as “Cubist Composition” (1926) and “Three
Figures Outdoors” (1929). The trend continued in the period
1930–32, in works in which emotions and erotic themes were
given Surrealist sculptural form (“Suspended Ball” and “The
Palace at 4 A.M.”). In 1933–34 Giacometti attempted
metaphorical compositions using the themes of life and death
(“The Invisible Object” and “1 + 1 = 3”). At this time he
was disturbed by the thought 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. Breaking
definitely with the Surrealist group in 1935, he began to
work after nature again; what had started as mere studies
became a lifelong adventure: the phenomenological approach
to reality—that is, the search for the given reality in what
one sees when one is looking at a person.
Around 1940 Giacometti arrived at
matchstick-sized sculptures: figures and heads seen
frontally as ungraspable appearances of reality far away in
space. Around 1947 his massless, weightless image of reality
was expressed in a skeletal style, with figures thin as
beanstalks. From 1947 to 1950 he did compositions related to
his work of the early 1930s—“Tall Figures”; “City Square”;
“Composition with Seven Figures and a Head (The Forest)”;
and “Chariot”—and rapidly became known, 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.
The evolution of his art continued, taking
the form of a search for ways to challenge, actually to
equal, reality in sculpture as well as in painting. For
Giacometti 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 on gray canvases or on space-delimiting
bases. The artwork also had to be invested with the power of
acting on the spectator like a double of reality in real
space, as in portraits of Caroline or Elie Lotar, his models
and friends in the last years (1958–65), which are heads and
busts gazing intently and made only with lines of force,
without contour lines or surfaces. At this point the
phenomenological approach was superseded; he felt that
reality was no longer dependent on being perceived by
someone; reality simply was. Like the characters of
Beckett’s novels and plays his figures represented a
worldview in which space and time have their origin in the
core of each being. Giacometti died of an inflammatory heart
condition, without having carried out the final composition
of the work he had been concerned with since the early
1930s, the metaphor of the totality of life.
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.
The Art Gallery (Kunsthaus) in Zürich and
the Beyeler Gallery in Basel, Switz., have the most
comprehensive collections of Giacometti’s sculpture (on loan
from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation). Other important
collections are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City,
and in the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul, Fr.
Reinhold D. Hohl
Encyclopædia Britannica
