About Alberto Giacometti: Swiss Sculptor and Painter (1901-1966) (1901-1966)
Alberto Giacometti (, , [alˈbɛrto dʒakoˈmetti]; 10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. From 1922 he lived and worked mainly in Paris, but regularly visited his hometown of Borgonovo to see family and work on his art.
Giacometti was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. His work is particularly influenced by artistic styles such as Cubism and Surrealism. Philosophical questions about the human condition, as well as existentialist and phenomenological debates, play an important role in his work. Around 1935, he abandoned his influences on Surrealism for a more in-depth analysis of figurative works. Giacometti wrote for journals and exhibition catalogues and recorded his thoughts and memories in notebooks and diaries. His self-critical nature led to great doubts about his work and whether he could do justice to his artistic ideas, but it was a huge motivator.
Between 1938 and 1944, Giacometti’s sculptures reached a maximum height of 7 cm (2.75 in). Their small size reflects the actual distance between the artist’s position and his models. In this case, he criticized himself: “But I wanted to create from memory what I saw, and to my horror, the sculptures became smaller and smaller”. After World War II, Giacometti created his most famous sculptures: extremely tall and slender figurines. The sculptures are influenced by his personal viewing experience – between an imagined but real, a tangible but inaccessible space.
In Giacometti’s oeuvre, his paintings constitute only a very small part. After 1957, however, his figurative paintings existed as well as his sculptures. His late works are almost monochromatic paintings without any reference to any other modern art style.
early life
Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, in Val Bregaglia, an alpine valley in the southern canton of Graubünden near the Italian border. – The eldest of four children in Stampa. He is descended from Protestant refugees who fled the Inquisition. He comes from an artistic background and has been interested in art since childhood. Alberto studied at the Geneva Academy of Fine Arts. His brothers Diego (1902-1985) and Bruno (1907-2012) would also go on to be artists and architects. In addition, his cousin Zaccaria Giacometti, who later became professor and rector of constitutional law at the University of Zurich, grew up with them and was orphaned at the age of 12 in 1905.
Profession
In 1922 he moved to Paris to study with the sculptor and Rodin’s assistant, Antoine Bourdelle. There, Giacometti experimented with Cubism and Surrealism, and is regarded as one of the leading Surrealist sculptors. His colleagues included Miró, Max Ernst, Picasso, Bror Hjorth and Balthus.
Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculptures on human heads, focusing on the gaze of the nanny. He preferred the model he was close to – his sister and artist Isabel Rossone (then known as Isabel Delmer). Next is the stage where his Isabel statue is elongated. Her limbs stretched out. He was fascinated by sculptures conceived in accordance with his unique view of reality, often sculpted to be as thin as a fingernail and shrunk to the size of a pack of cigarettes. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to carve you, “he would make your head look like a blade”.
During World War II, Giacometti took refuge in Switzerland. There, in 1946, he met Annette Arm, secretary of the Red Cross. They were married in 1949.
After he got married, his small sculptures got bigger, but the bigger they got, the thinner they got. For the rest of Giacometti’s life, Annette was his main female model. His paintings go through a parallel process. These numbers appear isolated and severely attenuated due to constant rework.
He often revisits his subjects: one of his favorite models is his younger brother Diego.
old age
Cat, 1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1958, Giacometti was asked to create a monumental sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York, which was under construction. Although he “had the ambition to create works for public squares” over the years, he “never set foot in New York and knew nothing about life in a fast-growing metropolis. He also never saw a real skyscraper,” according to His biographer James Lord said.Giacometti’s work on the project resulted in four standing female figures – his largest sculptures – named Grande femme debut I to IV (1960). However, the commission was never completed because Giacometti was dissatisfied with the relationship between the sculpture and the site and abandoned the project.
In 1962, Giacometti won the Sculpture Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale and gained worldwide fame. Even when he gained notoriety and his work was popular, he still redesigned models, often destroying them or setting them aside to be returned years later. The prints made by Giacometti are often overlooked, but the catalog raisonné, Giacometti – full graphic and 15 paintings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), commenting on their impact and specifying the number of copies per print. There are only 30 versions of some of his most important images, many of which were described as rare in 1970.
In his later years, Giacometti’s work was exhibited in many major exhibitions in Europe. In 1965 he rode the wave of international fame and, despite his ill health, traveled to the United States to have an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.As his last work, he prepared the text for this book paris finlessa series of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places he has lived.
die
Giacometti died of heart disease (pericarditis) and chronic bronchitis in 1966 at Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was buried close to his parents.
Without children, Annette Giacometti became the sole holder of his property rights. She worked to collect her late husband’s full list of certified works, to gather documents about the location and manufacture of his work, and to fight the growing number of counterfeit works. When she died in 1993, the Giacometti Foundation was established by the French government.
In May 2007, the executor of his widow’s estate, former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, was convicted of illegally selling Giacometti’s works to top auctioneer Jacques Tajan, who also found guilty. Both were ordered to pay 850,000 euros to the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation.
art analysis
Alberto Giacometti Photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Regarding Giacometti’s sculptural technique, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The rough, corroded, reworked surfaces in Three Walkers (II) in 1949 are typical of his technique. The figures are restored to At its core, evoking that in this style, Giacometti rarely deviates from the three themes he focuses on—the walking man; the standing naked woman; the bust—or a combination of all three, combined into different group.”
Giacometti wrote in a letter to Pierre Matisse: “The figure is never a compact mass, but a transparent structure”. In this letter, Giacometti writes about how he looks back on the realist classical busts of his youth with nostalgia, and tells the story of the existential crisis of the style that led to his fame.
“[I rediscovered] I want to use people to compose pictures. For this, I had to (I quickly thought; by the way) did a study or two from nature enough to understand the construction of the head and the construction of the whole figure, and in 1935 made a model. I thought, this research should take two weeks before I can realize my work…I worked with models all day from 1935 to 1940…everything was not as I imagined. A head, to me, became a completely unknown and dimensionless object. ”
Because of the delicate realism Giacometti achieved with ease when executing the bust in early adolescence, Giacometti’s difficulty in reapproaching the figure in adulthood is often understood as a sign of a meaningful struggle for existence, rather than a technical flaw.
Giacometti was a key figure in the Surrealist art movement, but his work rejected simple categorization. Some describe it as formalism, others see it as expressionist, or related to what Deleuze calls “sensory blocks” (as in Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon). Even after his excommunication from the Surrealist group, although his sculptural intentions were usually parody, the final product was an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He tried to create a reproduction of the models the way he saw them and the way he thought they should be seen. He once said that he sculpted not figures, but “shadows cast”.
Scholar William Barrett in The Irrational Man: A Philosophical Study of Existentialism (1962) argue that the weakened forms of Giacometti’s figures reflect 20th century modernist and existentialist views that modern life is increasingly hollow and meaningless. “All sculpture today, like sculpture in the past, will one day fall to pieces… So it is important to carefully shape one’s work in the smallest recess and breathe life into every particle of matter.”
An exhibition at the Musée des Arts in Paris from 2011 to 2012 focused on how Giacometti was inspired by Etruscan art.
Giacometti’s work at the 31st Venice Biennale, 1962, photographed by Paolo Monti
heritage
exhibition
Giacometti’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (2019); “Alberto Giacometti: Through Time”, Pera Museum, Istanbul (2015), Pushkin Museum, Moscow (2008); “Alberto Giacometti’s Studio: Collection of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation”, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007-2008); Rotterdam Kunsthaus (2008); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009), Buenos Aires (2012); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2013) and High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1970).
National Portrait Gallery, London’s first solo exhibition of Giacometti’s work, pure existence Open to 5-star reviews on October 13, 2015 (until January 10, 2016, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death). Since April 2019, the Prado Museum in Madrid has been highlighting Giacometti in its exhibitions.
public collection
Giacometti’s work has been exhibited in numerous public…
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