Alberto Giacometti is a famous Swiss artist who worked in several mediums. He is famous for his sculptures of human forms. They look a lot like stick people.
He was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland on October 10, 1901. Giacometti’s dad was a painter and because of this Giacometti knew how to paint by the time he was 11. When he was 12, he sculpted a bust of his brother.
Later, he went to Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied sculpture at the School of Arts and Crafts and took lessons in drawing at the School for Fine Arts. At the age of 20, Giacometti went to Italy for nine months. While he was there, he studied baroque, early Christian and Egyptian art. It was on this trip that he decided to become an artist. Living through both World War I and World War II, he changed with the world around him and so did his art. By 1955, Giacometti’s work was in the Guggenheim. In 1962, he won the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Bieniale. Three years later, he won the French Government’s Grand Prix National des Arts. Giacometti died of heart and respiratory problems on January 11, 1966, in Switzerland.
Here are some interesting facts about Alberto Giacometti:
• He started his first studio with his brother in Paris in 1925.
• He found inspiration in plastic art of primitive people.
• As a Surrealist in the 1930s, he devised innovative sculptural forms, sometimes reminiscent of toys and games. (Surrealism uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of it being logical or easy to understand.)
• In the second half of the 1930s, Giacometti worked a lot on studies of heads. His figures got smaller and smaller in size, sometimes being no larger than just a few centimeters, but painting was still an important means of artistic expression for him, too.
• In the 1930s, Giacometti and his brother, Diego, earned a living by working for the Parisian interior architect Jean-Michel Frank. They made designs for lamps and furniture.
• After World War II, he returned to Paris and started sculpting thin, elongated bronze figures. This is the sculpting style for which he is well known.
• His face and some of his works appear on the 100 franc (Swiss currency.)
Giacometti’s sculptures are quite distinctive. Because his style is unlike other famous sculptors, he has had a big impact on the art world. Other artists and art enthusiasts learned from the way he used the emptiness around an object to highlight the forms he created. His sculptures of the human form reduce the body to its essential elements, something no other artist had done before him. It had a big influence on the minimalist movement. Minimalist art is known for its simplicity in both form and content.
