GIACOMETTI Alberto

Biography of Alberto GIACOMETTI

Alberto GIACOMETTI (born 10 October 1901 in Borgonovo, Bregaglia) is a Swiss sculptor and painter.

He was born in 1901 in Switzerland, in the canton of Grisons. He is the eldest of four children. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, himself a painter, encouraged him to become interested in art. He painted his first works in the family home, mainly portraits of family members or condisciples, taking on the paternal post-impressionist style. At the end of his compulsory schools, Alberto left to study at the École des beaux-arts in Geneva before arriving in Paris in January 1922.

He attended the workshop of Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. He discovered cubism, African art and Greek statuary and was inspired by it in his first works. His sculptures are made of plaster, sometimes painted or cast in bronze, a technique which he will practice until the end of his life.

In December 1926, he moved to No. 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron (14th arrondissement), in "the cave-workshop" which he would not leave, despite the small size and discomfort of the premises. His brother Diego joined him permanently in 1930. Although most of his production is in Paris, Giacometti regularly returns to Switzerland where he works in his father's workshop in Maloja, a hamlet of Stampa. In 1927, Giacometti exhibited his first works at the Salon des Tuileries (Woman spoon, 1927).

After creating "flat" (Woman, 1929) and "open" sculptures (Man and Woman, 1929), Giacometti approached surrealists and exhibited, from 1930, alongside Joan Miró and Jean Arp, at the Pierre gallery with which he entered into a contract in 1929. He met Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, André Masson. He officially joined the surrealist group in Paris in 1931. He created engravings and drawings to illustrate books by René Crevel, Tristan Tzara and André Breton. He participated in the drafting of the group's reviews.

With La Boule suspended, Giacometti realized the first "symbolically functioning object" (1930) and a series of surrealist sculptures that enchanted Breton: The invisible object (1934), Le Palais at 4 a.m., about which he published a capital text. For years, I have made only sculptures that have offered all finished to my mind; i merely reproduced them in space without changing anything, without wondering what they meant. […] Nothing ever appeared in the form of a painting, I rarely see in the form of a drawing. The attempts I have sometimes made, conscious realization of a table or even a sculpture, have always failed. […] Once built, I tend to find transformed and displaced images, impressions, facts that have moved deeply (often without my knowledge), forms that I feel very close, although I am often unable to identify them, which makes them more and more troubling..." (Minotaure, 1933).

Anxiety, onirism, uncertainty, violence are the characteristics of the sculptures of this time: Cube, Woman walking, Woman lying in bed who dreams, Slaughtered woman, Cage, Flower in danger, Unhappy object to throw, Table, Head skull. Most of his youthful or surrealist works are known by their bronze edition made in the last ten years of the artist's life.

Excluded from the surrealist group in 1935, Giacometti nevertheless maintained friendly relations with Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour, and his sculptures would continue to be presented in the various surrealist exhibitions.

From 1935, Giacometti abandoned the anecdote and literary titles to pursue a quest for the representation of reality, producing series of heads for which his brother and model pose.

In December 1941, he left Paris for Geneva. He works in a hotel room, continuing the production of tiny sculptures started in Paris. The impossibility of making a large sculpture haunting him, and it was only after defeating this obstacle with the Woman on the cart in 1944-1945 that he left Switzerland.

In September 1945, Giacometti returned to Paris where he was joined in 1946 by Annette Arm, whom he married in 1949. In October 1946, André Breton, returning from the United States, told the press: "At the end of his new research, I enthusiastically checked that in sculpture, Giacometti had managed to synthesize his previous concerns from which he always seemed to depend the creation of the style of our time. »[réf. nécessaire] Nevertheless, Giacometti declined Breton's proposal to join him and participate actively in Breton's exhibition at Maeght Gallery: Surrealism in 1947. However, some of his works echo surrealism (Le Nez, 1947-1949, and La Main, 1947).

It was during this period (1946-1947) that Giacometti's new style was established, characterized by high filiform figures. His production was stimulated by his renewed relationship with New York merchant Pierre Matisse, who hosted his first post-war personal exhibition in January 1948. Thanks to the renewal of the agreements made in 1936 with the galerist, Giacometti can melt in bronze, in 1947, eight of his new sculptures, including L'Homme qui pointe and the first man who walks. In 1948, the Three Men Who Walk and the Places followed. But it is for the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse gallery in December 1950 that Giacometti produces some of its most famous sculptures from which the bronze edition begins: Four women on base, Four figures on pedestal, La Forêt, La Clairière, La Cage, Le Chariot, The Woman walking between two boxes that are houses.

It was only in June 1951 that his first post-war exhibition took place in Paris, at the Maeght gallery, where his friend Louis Clayeux convinced him to enter. He presents works already shown at the Matisse gallery and several new works, all in plaster, including Le Chat and Le Chien. Contrary to the legend that Aimé Maeght allowed Giacometti to melt his works in bronze, Giacometti can melt what he wants, since 1947, thanks to Pierre Matisse.

In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre had signed the preface of his first exhibition in New York, "La Recherche de l'absolu". In 1951, Leiris and Ponge accompanied the exhibition at Maeght. In 1954, Sartre wrote another reference text on the artist. The same year, Giacometti met Jean Genet, whose portrait he made, and it was for the publication of the Maeght gallery, Behind the Mirror, that Genet wrote in 1957 one of the most brilliant essays on the artist, L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti.

From the mid-1950s Giacometti reduced his designs to heads, busts and figures. Representing France at the Venice Biennale in 1956, Giacometti exhibited a series of female figures a little smaller than nature, later known as Women of Venice, although some were first shown in Bern that year. At the end of 1958 he obtained, thanks to Pierre Matisse, an order for a place in New York in front of Chase Manhattan Bank, a project which he abandoned. For this monument, he creates three elements: a large woman, a walking man, a large head, continuing his previous research in large size. This monument will eventually be installed only in the courtyard of the Maeght Foundation. It then includes two walking men, two great women and a monumental head.

At the end of his life, Giacometti was filled with honors. He won the Carnegie Prize in 1961, the Grand Prize of sculpture of the Venice Biennale in 1962, the Guggenheim Prize in 1964 and the Grand Prize of international arts awarded by France in 1965.

In February 1963, Giacometti had a stomach cancer and cured him. At that time, he actively participated in the Maeght Foundation's project by giving a gift for the price of the melting of a large number of bronzes ("There is some interest in these sculptures being grouped together," he wrote to Pierre Matisse[réf. nécessaire]). In his last years, he followed closely the Foundation's project in his name, which was created in Switzerland to collect the collection of G. David Thompson, a Pittsburgh industrialist who was planning to open a museum in the United States.

Alberto Giacometti died at the cantonal hospital in Coire, Switzerland, on 11 January 1966. His body was transferred to Borgonovo and buried at his parents' grave.

His widow, who survived him until 19 September 1993, devoted himself to defending his work and created by will the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, recognized as a public utility in 2003, whose headquarters are in Paris. It includes a large number of paintings and sculptures by the artist, as well as a research and documentation centre.