Figures
by
Alberto
Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
was born in Switzerland. He was
one of the most outstanding
artists of the 20th Century.
As a boy, Giacometti was very talented. His father
was also a painter and he encouraged Alberto to go to
Art school in Geneva. Giacometti remembered:
“Once in my father's studio, when I was eighteen or
nineteen, I was drawing some pears which were on a table.
But they kept getting smaller and smaller. I'd begin again,
and they'd always go back to exactly the same size.
My father got irritated and said: 'Now start doing them as
they are, as you see them..’ And he corrected them to lifesize. I tried to do them like that, but I couldn't help rubbing
out; so I rubbed them out, and half an hour later my pears
were exactly as small to the millimetre as the first ones.”
To learn more about art, Giacometti travelled to
Italy and France, where he saw famous collections
of paintings and sculptures. He settled in Paris
where he had a studio. At first, he was inspired
by African and Oceanic Art (from the Pacific
Ocean islands) and abstract art.
In 1939, at the start of
World War 2, Giacometti
returned to Switzerland.
In 1940, he was working
mostly on figures from
memory.
He began making very
small, almost weightless
figures. He remembered
glimpsing a young woman in
Paris. He would make the
same figure of her over
and over again, smaller and
smaller, until it became
fragile and minute .
“ T o m y te rror th e sc ulp tu re s b e cam e
sm alle r an d sm alle r. O n ly w h e n sm all
w e re th e y lik e (th e p e rson ), b ut all
th e sam e th e se d im e n sion s re vo lte d
m e , an d tire le ssly I b e gan again , on ly
to e n d up , a fe w m on th s la te r, at th e
sam e p o in t.”
W h e n h e p a c k e d u p to le a ve G e n e va a n d re tu rn to
P a ris, h is to ta l o u tp u t w h ile h e w a s th e re f itte d in to
h a lf -a -d o z e n m a tc h b o x e s! I t w a s o n ly w h e n h e
re tu rn e d to P a ris a f te r th e w a r th a t h e f o u n d h im se lf
a b le to m a k e sc u lp tu re s o f m o re n o rm a l d im e n sio n s,
b u t n o w th e y w e re ta ll a n d th in .
Giacometti continued to
create pencil-fine
sculptures in black metal.
He believed it was
impossible to capture an
accurate portrait, but he
tried to get the sense of
the person through small
differences - the slope of
the shoulders, the tilt of
the head. He manages to
mix details with a sense
of seeing a far-off figure.
Women are usually shown standing, men are shown striding.
Giacometti said “How can any sculptor
know and make known to anybody else,
the being who sits before them?”
The surfaces of Giacometti’s figures
still bear the subtle imprint of his
fingers.
Giacometti liked to imagine his sculptures positioned
on a street corner, or crossing a busy town square,
out there in the real world.
Giacometti also made figures
of animals like this dog and cat.
In the 1950s Giacometti
became more famous and
his sculptures were
popular following a
successful exhibition in
New York, U.S.A., in 1948.
However, he was never
really happy being famous
and continued to live
and work in the same
shabby studio in Paris
that he had shared
with his brother Diego
(a furniture designer),
since the 1920s.
Giacometti was awarded a major prize for sculpture in
1962, but then his health began to fail. He died of heart
disease in Switzerland in June 1966.
Examples of his sculptures can be seen in Galleries
all over the world.