Giacometti, Alberto

born Oct. 10, 1901, Borgonovo, Switz.

died Jan. 11, 1966, Chur

Swiss sculptor and painter.

His father was a Post-Impressionist painter, and his brother Diego was a well-known furniture designer. After studying art in Geneva (1919–20) and Paris (1922–25), he developed a style related to the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko and the post-Cubist work of Jacques Lipchitz. His work also showed the influence of African and Oceanic art. After experimenting with abstraction in the 1930s, he became increasingly focused on finding ways to capture a sense of reality in sculpture. For Giacometti an artwork was to become an almost existential evocation of reality. By the 1940s he had developed his signature style, producing thin, attenuated sculptures of solitary, skeletal figures and heads. He became well known, especially in the U.S., through two exhibitions in New York City (1948, 1950) and an essay on his art by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1963 he designed a stage set for a production of a Samuel Beckett play.

Giacometti, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965

© Karsh from Rapho/Photo Researchers

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▪ Swiss sculptor and painter

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

Additional Reading

James Lord, Giacometti (1985), focuses on his life. Luigi Carluccio, Giacometti: A Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings (1967), contains 144 drawings after other masters and one of the last autobiographical texts. Some important critical studies of his work are Herbert Lust, Giacometti: The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings (1970), useful for the reproductions; James Lord, Alberto Giacometti Drawings (1971), with a considerate introduction and a chronology and bibliography; Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti (1972), a comprehensive monograph, with many quotations, a special dates and documents section, a systematic bibliography, and 196 plates; Herbert Matter and Mercedes Matter, Alberto Giacometti (1987), on the artist's portraits in sculpture and painting, with photographic essays on his birthplace and Paris studio; and Valerie J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti, 1901–1966 (1988), an exhibition catalog describing 105 works of sculpture, painting, and drawing.

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