2. Artists & stock
3. Alberto Giacometti
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in Borgonovo (Switzerland). He learnt very early the painting with his father (Giovanni), then the sculpture to the School of the Arts and Professions by Geneva (1919-1920). He settled down in France (Paris) in 1922 ; his brother Diego joined him three years later. Giacometti finished learning in Antoine Bourdelle's studio. He made realistic paintings and realistic sculptures. Giacometti was in the Studio of the Big Thatched cottage from 1922 till 1927.
It is in 1925, that he began to made imaginary sculptures which evoke the human shape, the «flat sculptures» and the «opened sculptures». In 1926, under the influence of Laurens, Zadkine and Lipchitz, Alberto Giacometti started being interested in the cubism. His first personal exhibition is organized in 1930, while he has already joined the surrealist group (he left it in 1934). It was with Miro, Masson and Leiris that he discovered seriously the surrealist world. He drew, etched, and illustrated (Crevel). His surrealist works evoke the violence, the sex and the death.
In 1934, time of loneliness, he destroyed some of his works and he decided to return to a work which is «a copy of the reality» ; the artist wanted to report the outside world, the face and the whole human being (numerous busts of his brother). The painted works are simple: no subtleties and few colored. He entered in a time with sculptures smaller and smaller.
Giacometti avoided the war by settling down in Geneva. When he came back to Paris in 1945, he didn’t stop working (sculptures, drawings, etchings, etc.) with another look on his work ; he began a series of bronze statues or in painted plaster, effigies of men and women, bare, lengthened, stretch, and gaunt. His effigies showed an existential distress, threadlike skeletons, and skeletons in movement. He also created a little later, sculptures of animals, according to the same principles of reduction of the silhouette. At the same time, he painted portraits according to nature, defining the space by networks of line where Giacometti tried above all to restore the intensity of the presence and the look. Giacometti also investigated his analyses in his graphic work.
In 1965, retrospectives of the artist’s work were abroad (England, Denmark, and the United States). In 1966, he received the First price of sculpture of the Biennal of Venice and the first big French retrospective of his whole work is organized in the Orangerie (Paris) in 1969.
Strucked down by a cancer, he died in 1966 to Coire (Switzerland).

"The idea to make a painting or a sculpture of the thing such as I see it do not come any more. It is to understand why that misses, that I want "- Alberto Giacometti

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