Alberto Giacometti

modernist sculptor, painter and graphic artist

He lived and worked in Paris from 1922, in the 14th district. Giacometti is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. His work is influenced by cubism, surrealism and philosophical questions about the human condition, existentialism and phenomenology.

Years

1901-1966

Nationality

Switzerland

His tribulations in the 6th

Giacometti exhibits for the first time in 1930 in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Along with Joan Miró and Jean Arp, Giacometti is represented at the Pierre de Pierre Loeb GalleryAndré Breton saw and bought Giacometti's art object, the Hanging Ball plastic, the first "symbolically functional object".

He met Pablo Picasso in the surrealist circle and a friendship between them began when Picasso was working on his monumental painting Guernica in 1937 in his Picasso Workshopan attic in the 5-7 rue des Grands-Augustins, from 6th district. Apart from Henri Matisse, Giacometti is the only artist with whom Picasso discusses art, but he pushes him around a bit on his painting and sculpture. Although he understood that Giacometti was struggling for something, he considered this struggle - unlike his struggle for cubism - to be a false path, since, according to Picasso, he would never achieve what he demanded and made sculpture for "...] to make us miss the masterpieces he will never create.

In 1939, Giacometti met the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir at the Café de Flore, 172 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Shortly after Sartre's first meeting with Giacometti, the philosopher wrote his main work L'Être et le Néant. Tentative d'ontologie phénoménologique, which was first published in 1943 and in which some of Giacometti's reflections were incorporated. Giacometti was interested in phenomenology all his life. Since he was a student in Geneva, he had been searching for a new form of artistic expression36. 36 In the same year he began to model busts and heads the size of walnuts, his sculpted figures becoming very small.

In February 1952, Alberto Giacometti met his future biographer James Lord at Café Les Deux Magotswho occasionally serves as a model for his drawings.

In 1954, Sartre wrote another seminal text on the artist. That same year, Giacometti met Jean Genet, whose portrait he painted, and it was for the Maeght Gallery's publication Derrière le miroir that Genet wrote one of the most brilliant essays on the artist in 1957, Alberto Giacometti's studio.

In November 1955, Giacometti met at the café Les Deux Magots the Japanese philosophy professor Isaku YanaiharaHe was to write an article about the sculptor for a Japanese magazine40. Yanaihara became his friend and served as his model from 1956 until 1961, for several paintings and sculptures. The Japanese professor published the first biography of Giacometti in Tokyo in 1958.

Samuel Beckett, whom Giacometti had known since 1937 and with whom he often discussed the difficulties of life as an artist in Parisian bars, asked him in 1961 to participate in a new production ofWaiting for Godotwhich premiered in January 1953. Giacometti creates a sparse plaster-of-Paris tree as a backdrop for the drama of human solitude staged by Roger Blin in May 1961 at the Théâtre de l'Odéon.