Giacometti, Alberto

Giacometti, Alberto (älbĕr`tō jäkōmĕt`tē), 1901–66, Swiss sculptor and painter; son of the impressionist painter Giovannia Giacometti; b. Stampa. He settled in Paris in 1922, studying with Bourdelle and becoming associated first with the cubists and then the surrealists (see cubism; surrealism). His Slaughtered Woman (1932; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), for example, is a violent surrealist work. Giacometti abandoned surrealist images in 1935. In the 1930s and thereafter, he created highly original sculptures of elongated, emaciated human figures, usually in bronze. He also made open cagelike structures (e.g., The Palace at 4 AM, 1933; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) that were equally powerful.

Giacometti's haunting, anguished images have been described as perfect expressions of existentialist pessimism. In the early 1940s he created works on a drastically reduced scale. In his later years he again formed tall, slender, roughly worked figures that are among his most impressive sculptures. In his mature work, he concentrated on three basic themes for his attenuated figures—the seated portrait, the walking man, and the standing female nude, the latter two often with tiny shrunken heads and enormous, rooted feet. Giacometti's imagery and his plastic technique have had an extensive influence on modern sculpture. Many of his oil paintings and drawings, notably his portraits with their delicate, weblike tangle of lines, are also works of great distinction.

Bibliography

See biography by J. Lord (1985); catalog of the Museum of Modern Art (1965); drawings ed. by J. Lord (1971); J. Lord, Giacometti Portrait (1965), studies by R. Hohl (1971) and D. Sylvester (1996).

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Giacometti, Alberto

Giacometti, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965

(credit: © Karsh from Rapho/Photo Researchers)

(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.