Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-66) – Artist Resources

Fondation Giacometti: The Institut Giacometti, artist biography, artwork and archives, exhibitions and publications

In one of his final interviews, Giacometti spoke with noted art critic David Sylvester about his sculptures and the
aesthetic of ever-increasing slenderness and height. Sylvester curated the Tate Gallery’s inaugural retrospective of
the artist in 1965.

The British Film Institute produced a short film in 1967 in

conjunction with the Tate’s exhibition, capturing
Giacometti at work in his studio sketching from his own
sculptures and hand-modeling clay maquettes.
Giacometti in his atelier, 1957
Photograph: Robert Doisneu
Giacometti returned to the Tate in 2017 for the eponymous survey, Giacometti. With the
collaboration of Fondation Giacometti and the generosity of the artist’s late wife, Annette’s, estate,
the Tate Modern took visitors through ten rooms representing the totality of Giacometti’s prolific
fifty-year career, featuring a treat with previously un-exhibited plaster casts and drawings.

The Guardian profiled Giacometti’s personal and professional life in honor of the Tate’s ambitious
2017 exhibition.

Through summer 2020, the Institut Giacometti is currently hosting Giacometti: À la recherche des
oeuvres disparues (In Search of Lost Works), which explores the myth of Giacometti’s artistic
dissatisfaction and destruction of his own work. Using sketches, notebooks, and photographs from
their archival collection, the Institut reconstructs the artist’s infamous “lost” works.
Giacometti, ca. 1950s
Photograph: Gordon Parks/Getty Images
Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-66)
Tête d’homme, ca. 1955
Colored wax crayons on paper

Private Collection; L2022:139.1

Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti spent the majority of his career in Paris in the wake of World
War II. The artist’s thin, elongated figures often reflect the existential fear and loneliness that
permeated life in postwar Europe. Though he is primarily known as a sculptor, Giacometti also
created drawings, paintings, and prints of his figurative subjects. Tête d’homme (“Head of a
man”) is a rare example of the artist’s work in vivid color. Giacometti later reflected: “…it was
never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one
color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!”

On view February 1 – May 7, 2023

Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-66)
Buste d'Annette VIII, conceived in 1962 and cast in 1965
Bronze with brown and green patina

Private Collection; L2019:138.1

Modern artist Alberto Giacometti created eight plaster busts of his wife, Annette, in 1962,
completing the series with two more in 1964 and 1965. The group marks the only period of
concentrated portraiture of his wife in the artist’s career. Giacometti’s idiosyncratic manipulation of
bronze yields a heavily textured surface at odds with his choice of medium. The delicate features and
abstracted upper body of Annette seem to have more in common with an unfinished mass of
modeled clay that still retains the heat of the sculptor’s hands. Her face is alive with wisdom and
discerning beauty as she gazes unflinchingly toward viewers. Though remembered as one of the
most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, Giacometti was also a highly creative painter,
draftsman, and printmaker. His innovative conceptual style transitioned away from the influence of
Cubism and Surrealism in the 1930s as the artist settled into the psychological, often haunting,
explorations of the human figure for which he is best known.

On view January 15 – April 19, 2020

Giacometti, ca. 1960

NO PHOTOGRAPHY Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-66)
Femme qui Marche II, 1932-36
Bronze

Private Collection; L2020:9.1

Sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti studied in Geneva and worked mostly in Paris, where
he settled in 1922. It was here that Giacometti witnessed the radical experimentations of the
city’s avant-garde movements, such as Cubism and Surrealism, which introduced new avenues
of expression to his philosophical interest in the human condition. The physically and
psychologically haunting array of tall, slender figures he produced after WWII established
Giacometti as one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Femme qui Marche II
(Woman Walking II) provides a glimpse into artist’s brief flirtation with Surrealism in the early
1930s. He found affinity with the movement’s visionary embrace of dreams, the unconscious,
and the uncanny, which he incorporated into a renewed interest in the human figure. Despite
the title, this “walking” woman seems to stand perfectly still. Absent a head and arms, with
regal posture and subtle contrapposto, she evokes the ancient statuary of Egypt, Greece, and
Rome that Giacometti sketched during trips to the Louvre.

On view February 16 – May 31, 2020