Alberto Giacometti

Swiss sculptor and painter

• Born: October 10, 1901
• Birthplace: Borgonovo, Switzerland
• Died: January 11, 1966
• Place of death: Chur, Switzerland

Giacometti was not only one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century but also a distinguished painter and draftsman. His attenuated, gaunt sculptured figures, as well as his paintings and drawings of persons with eyes transfixed in a disturbing stare, have become icons of modern art.

Early Life

Alberto Giacometti (zhyah-koh-MEHT-tee) was born in the mountain village of Borgonovo, near Stampa, in an Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. His father, Giovanni, and godfather, Cuno Amiet, were both painters who had assimilated post-Impressionist and Fauvist styles. Alberto was the eldest of four siblings of whom his younger brother by one year, Diego, was to remain his closest friend, sharing his life and work from 1925 on. When young Alberto turned to drawing at about the age of ten, he was welcome in his father’s studio.

His skills in drawing began to flourish when he enrolled in 1915 at a Protestant secondary school in Schiers. In his three years there, he proved a brilliant student, excelling not only in the fine arts but also in literature, history, and the physical sciences. In 1919, Alberto attended Geneva’s École des Arts et Métiers (school of arts and crafts) but disliked its instruction. After a year, he left this institute and spent the next year in Italy, beginning a lifelong fascination with Tintoretto’s and Giotto’s paintings. For the rest of his career, he was to attend museums frequently and make innumerable copies of their works on display.

Urged by his father, Giacometti studied with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle at Paris’s Académie Grande Chaumière from 1922 to 1927. However, he found himself increasingly discontented with his professor’s Rodin-oriented representational precepts. By 1925, he had set up his own Parisian studio and undertook his first commissions. By 1927, he had moved to what was to become his famous two-room atelier at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, located in a quiet, proletarian district. Although it was cramped, cold, and dingy, with concrete floors, he found it congenial and insisted on living and working there until his death. His brother Diego rented a studio in the same building, devoted himself to assisting Alberto, and became his favored model.

From the mid-1920’s on, Giacometti made a close study of African, Oceanic, and Cycladic works. Primitive art played a pivotal role in freeing him to rethink the human figure so as to simplify, abbreviate, and deform it. Two of his 1926-1927 sculptures, The Couple (Man and Woman) and The Spoon-Woman, use geometric emblems to indicate the male and the female, with the woman conceptualized as a fetishistic vessel, her lower limbs unrealized.

Life’s Work

Giacometti’s first mature manner, from 1925 to about 1929, was postcubist. Cubist art had been practiced in Paris since 1907, stressing a revolutionary stereometric vocabulary of geometric planes, polygons, cylinders, and cubes. By 1927, Giacometti was ready to start a phase of wide-ranging experimentation: One of his works, Composition , features a solid mass with richly varied surface volumes; another, identically named, is an openwork structure in which planes and volumes alternate rhythmically with open spaces.

In the spring of 1929, Giacometti was befriended by André Masson, a leader of the then-new Surrealist movement. Masson welcomed him to the Surrealist circle, which included such talents as André Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Antonin Artaud. The Surrealists chose their materials at random, according to subconscious or unconscious reservoirs of their imagination that often exceeded the scope of conscious, rational perceptions. Already prone to outlandish sexual fantasies, Giacometti began using violently erotic narratives in his sculptures. In Three Figures Outdoors (1929), two pointed spikes (males?) penetrate a zigzag form (female?) that twists back and forth. In his notorious early work Suspended Ball (1930), a slitted sphere hangs directly over a crescent, coming close but not touching it, implying a perpetual state of ungratified arousal. Giacometti’s most famous Surrealist sculpture, The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932), fabricates a miniature theatrical stage set composed of thin supports and fragile objects, all seemingly on the verge of collapse, featuring a woman, a skeletal bird, an upright pod, and a vertebral column. The work eludes explication, since its actors and objects do not interrelate; its architectural space appears haunted, spurring the viewer to free imaginative association.

By 1934, Giacometti was ready to break with Surrealism. In the winter of 1934-1935, he abruptly abandoned its abstract vocabulary and returned to a figurative style based on nature, struggling to redefine his art. His figures became smaller and smaller, until by 1939 they scarcely stood two inches tall. For years he worked on only a few heads and busts, refusing to exhibit anything from 1935 to 1946. Always interested in ideas, Giacometti met and read the works of such phenomenologists as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Starobinsky, who examined recurrent themes or images to understand the core structures of individual consciousness. He decided to rest his tiny heads and figures on solid bases that were much larger than the heads and figures would require for support. This contrast between the tiny figure and its large base caused the viewer to be struck by the frailty and puniness of the human being in an immense, empty universe.

From 1946 to 1952, Giacometti burst into a renewed period of creativity with works comparable to his 1926-1934 accomplishments in their intensity and variety. He stabilized his private life when, in 1946, he began to live with and, in 1949, married the high-spirited, adulatory Annette Arm. He was motivated to work at fever pitch for several comprehensive exhibitions at Pierre Matisse’s gallery and the Galérie Maeght. He was also tremendously stimulated by his friendships with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett. Sartre and Giacometti had many long discussions, both in the late 1930’s and during immediate post-World War II years, at a time when the artist was struggling to clarify his mature aesthetic. These talks, as well as Sartre’s novel La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949), undoubtedly helped shape Giacometti’s new vision, which most critics call existentialist.

Many of Giacometti’s 1946-1952 sculptures and paintings have elongated figures whose frail proportions and solitary stances suggest the essential isolation of individuals beset by angst in an absurd universe. Sartre wrote two widely influential essays on Giacometti’s work, in 1948 and 1955, which contributed to the artist’s critical success and tended to canonize him as an existentialist saint. The danger of such an interpretation is to reduce Giacometti’s art to its schema and themes, thereby diminishing the visual excitement and subtleties of his virtuosic lines, energized space, and brilliant use of lights and shadows. A profound change occurred, during the early to middle 1940’s, in the way he saw people and objects around him: He came to perceive the everyday world as alien his figures became extremely thin, almost weightless and massless; his forms retreated and dwindled in their surrounding space; space, in turn, receded in a disturbing manner that oppressed and unsettled forms. Giacometti had found his famed, emaciated signature style. He also renewed his bond with Surrealism. While he broke with the bizarre iconography that had characterized much of his 1930’s art, Giacometti conveyed in his postwar works an emotional expressionism, intimations of violence, anguish, and nightmares that correspond with and often exceed his earlier Surrealist purposes. His 1951 Dog , skinny, its long legs drained of energy, its neck disproportionately long, has a tragic presence that connotes both exhaustion and bare survival.

At least one critic, Reinhold Hohl, has drawn illuminating parallels between the postwar achievements of Giacometti and Samuel Beckett, who became his intimate friend in the early 1950’s. Both men experienced their creative peaks in the decade following World War II; they spent many nights exploring each other’s thoughts; Beckett’s twilight fiction, particularly L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1958), often reads like a gloss on Giacometti’s joyless, helpless, close-to-hopeless figures. In 1961, Giacometti made a plaster tree for a production of Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954). Each became the dominant postwar avant-garde artist of his respective genre.

After 1946 Giacometti devoted himself as intensely to drawing and painting as to sculpture. As a result, his sculpture became pictorial, that is, frontal, intended to be seen from a predetermined distance. On the other hand, the tactile forms of sculpture lent some solidity to the heads in his paintings. Around 1952 he began to focus on two basic compositional formats: half-length portrait busts and standing nudes, with Annette as well as Diego as his primary models. He even created a few small, buxom nudes in 1952 and 1953, in an effort to rid himself of the attenuated style that threatened to master him. His Busts of Diego (1954) have narrow, knifelike, tiny profiles but broad shoulders and massive upper bodies. The figures’ heads seem to shrink from the viewer’s eyes, implying inaccessibility and alienation.

Giacometti’s paintings of the 1950’s have multiple vibrating contours that create sensations of speed, urgency, and instability, keeping the viewer’s vision moving. These quickly drawn, fluid lines and the ghostly aspect of the figures with their fixed stares create disturbingly oppressive, fearsome effects. In the fall of 1956, Giacometti suffered an artistic crisis while painting Isaku Yanaihara, a Japanese professor of philosophy. He found himself unable to place Yanaihara’s face on canvas, even though the professor posed for more than several months. Somehow, Giacometti’s intent to represent not the uniqueness of an individual but that person’s idol-like typification was stalemated by his awareness of Yanaihara as a foreigner, a singular person. The perfectionist painter, unable to transcend this impasse, brooded despairingly for most of two years.

From 1958 to his death eight years later, Giacometti’s paintings exhibit a renewed passion and poise. He completed Yanaihara’s portrait from memory in 1959, repainting part of the face that he had scraped away, permitting a dark, gray space to overwhelm his subject’s small, remote head. His paintings assumed a renewed intensity and bravura, stamped by a powerful expressionism. His busts, particularly vivacious and radiant versions of Annette, which relinquish both phenomenological distortions and naturalism in favor of forceful animation, shared this freshness.

During what turned out to be his last year, Giacometti received many honors. The Tate Gallery in London held a major retrospective exhibition during July and August, 1965, as did the Museum of Modern Art in New York in June and October, 1965. A thirty-minute film was made in France, showing him at work. In November, 1965, he received the French Grande Prix National des Arts. In early December, he was hospitalized at Chur, Switzerland, for examination of circulation difficulties. On January 11, 1966, he died of heart failure.

Significance

Giacometti’s artistic development was rich, complex, various, and profound. Like Picasso, he was a painter’s son and brought up in a household in which art was admired. His prewar work, when disengaged from the avant-garde mythology surrounding it, was largely traditional: His paintings and drawings of the 1920’s are strongly Cézannean, while his sculptures are alternately cubistic and Brancusian. His Surrealist style shows the influence of Jean Arp and Joan Miró.

Giacometti’s achievement in the postwar years is, however, heroically innovative. His is a difficult and subtly nuanced art that incarnates immense intensity and metaphysical concern, often expressed in paradoxes of style and subject. His archetypal images of people are imbued with the terrible uncertainty of an anguished existence. Along with the work of such contemporaneous artists as Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet, his sculptures, paintings, and drawings present a powerfully troubling vision of reality as both permanent and mutable a secular kind of sacred art.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Valerie J., et al. Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. This handsome volume includes a brief memoir by the artist’s nephew, Silvio Berthoud; a well-chosen, selected bibliography; and astute interpretive essays by Reinhold Hohl and Valerie Fletcher, the latter being the curator of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in New York.

Giacometti, Alberto. Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1974. This exhibition was devoted not only to Giacometti but also to works by his father Giovanni, his cousin Augusto, and his godfather Cuno Amiet. Includes an introductory essay by Reinhold Hohl.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Giacometti: A Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings. Text by Luigi Carluccio. Translated by Barbara Luigia la Penta. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967. Giacometti has a five-hundred-word introduction to these 144 sketches, whose chronology he could not recall. The originals include a high proportion of non-European art.

Hohl, Reinhold. Alberto Giacometti. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971. Generally held to be the world’s outstanding Giacometti authority, Hohl has organized a massive tome that contains a three-part study of his subject: Giacometti’s background and early education, his artistic development, and his relationships with such contemporaries as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Genet, Camus, and Beckett. Hohl also includes a documentary biography, a bibliography, and many illustrations.

Juliet, Charles. Giacometti. New York: Universe, 1986. At the opposite pole from Hohl’s magisterial volume, this slight paperback is a concise, readable survey of the artist’s life and work. Includes 155 illustrations.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Giacometti.” In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Krauss, a distinguished critic of contemporary art, has composed a brilliant essay whose complex style may, however, intimidate general readers.

Lord, James. Mythic Giacometti. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Lord, who knew Giacometti and wrote an acclaimed biography of him, focuses here on Giacometti’s artistic development. He describes how Giacometti’s life evokes numerous comparisons to the Oedipus myth and depicts the artist as a heroic figure, whose work sustained him in a life filled with guilt and anxiety.

Wilson, Laurie. Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic, and the Man. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Wilson describes how Giacometti’s beliefs and emotional problems are reflected in his sculpture, paintings, and drawings.