Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
•
Alberto Giacometti
|
|
|
|
|
|
Alberto Giacometti |
| Birth Year : |
1901 |
| Death Year : |
1966 |
| Country : |
Switzerland |
Alberto Giacometti, the Surrealist sculptor known for his nervous, elongated forms, was born in Stampa, Switzerland.
Giacometti started drawing at the age of nine, painting at twelve and created his first sculpture at fourteen. His father
was a well-known Impressionist painter and Giacometti's first teacher. In 1919, Giacometti began studying sculpture in
Geneva and then, for three years, with Bourdelle in Paris. When he began to work on his own, Giacometti found that he had
difficulty working from the figure which seemed to disintegrate as he worked. He tried working instead from his imagination
and continued to do so for ten years. At this time Cubism, African art and the sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz, influenced his
work. His style gradually changed to become first thin and tablet-like and then solid and compact, in structures like "The
Couple", and "Spoon Woman". These last were bizarre, amusing monoliths, monumentally concave, combining a powerful physical
confrontation with erotic content.
In 1928 Giacometti felt the need to open his forms, creating grill-like works and then a series of cages-skeletal structures
that create three-dimensional environments, equivalent to Surrealist paintings. These culminated in the precise and
fantastic "Palace at 4 A.M.", a construction of wood, wire, glass and string. In 1935, Giacometti returned to working
from the live model, focusing on the tiny variations of each profile of the body. By sensitively exaggerating or reducing
each detail the projections, however tiny, reach out and make the surrounding space visible and part of the work. These
tactile elongated sculptures, for which Giacometti is best known, tend to disintegrate at close range. But viewed at some
distance they express a universal sense of a living organism. Giacometti's isolated single figures or groups which pass each
other without communication convey an anxious search arising from their loneliness, or stand straight and detached like
trees in an Alpine forest.
US
"I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true."
