Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was an important Swiss sculptor, born in the Bregaglia valley of the south-eastern Alps, in 1901. He was one of the artists in history whose work was most touched by philosophical narratives, impregnating his artistic expression with exceptionally rich and conceptually dense human representations. Firstly influenced by his father, post-impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, he although made the choice of becoming a sculptor, having left for Paris in 1922, where he should study with ÉmileAntoine Bourdelle. He established himself in the French capital with a very modest studio, where he would work up until his death, in 1966. His early work after finishing his studies, from 1926 onwards, shows a keen interest in developing African and Oceanic tribal art, a thematic that was most in vogue at the time, all over Europe, following the development of tribal expressions that had been carried out by cubist masters, such as Picasso, Derain, Archipenko or Duchamp-Villon. The work of Giacometti deliberately moved away from naturalism and realism, to embrace a meaningful existentialist problematic, something that can be explained through the existential questions raised by cultural encounters between urban and tribal. Among his most famous sculptures from this period is Spoon Woman (c.1927), inspired by the spoons used by the Dan tribe in central Africa, Spoon Woman is a piece of art that actually anticipates some life-long characteristics in Giacometti’s work, such as symmetry and flatness. Into the 1930’s he continued to develop abstraction in the construction and materiality of his works of art, although a transformation into surrealism had simultaneously begun, and one that certainly got the surrealists attention, particularly through the process of expressing unconscious desires by exploring eroticism. He joined André Breton’s surrealist movement in 1931, but was expelled in 1935 for allegedly producing realistic sculptures with models — however, he never conceptually abandoned the surrealistic inner vision of the world. Giacometti defined for himself two different ways of being an artist; the first, he said, was to work from home, in the sense that he was working from memory or imagination, the second was to work from life, but compartmentalizing all the conditions under which the act of looking takes place — whether distance, light, angle, consciousness, etc., in a process where perception plays a key-role. To the result of this blend between what is seen and the underlying conditions of seeing, Giacometti called “likeness”, as a contingency constructed of several factors. Among this myriad of factors was also of course scale, and that led him to pass five years producing minuscule figurines, no taller than 2 inches in height. In the 1940’s the artist worked mostly from memory, and was deeply marked by the altercations of WWII. He had to flee Paris twice, and was forced to stay for 5 years in Geneva from 1941 to 1946, to escape the Nazi occupation. He started making very thinbodied figures, with small heads and coarse textures, giving the impression that they were always far away in space, figures that later evolved to even thinner, skeletal anthropomorphic representations, deemed to be the ramshackle bodies of post-war survivors in Paris. In the later part of his life, from circa 1950, he started to dedicate as much time to painting as he did to sculpture. Maybe unexpectedly, his concerns with materiality and phenomenology were pushing his representational potential even further; in this unstoppable will of rendering his inner vision of reality, successful attempts were made at rendering the qualities of painting into sculpture, thus achieving a phenomenological dynamics between space and volume. Alberto Giacometti is one the most historically defining artists of 20th century art. He is represented in collections of the most important museums in the world and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre has essayed about the issues of perception in his work. His world record for an artwork sold at auction is 126 million dollars, at Christie’s New York in 2015.

Originally published at https://cabinetofcuriosity.me.