Alberto Giacometti Biography Quotes 18 Report mistakes

Early life and formation
Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in Borgonovo, a hamlet near Stampa in the Swiss canton of Graubunden. He grew up in a household shaped by art: his father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a noted painter who gave him early guidance, and his mother, Annetta, maintained the close-knit family base to which he would return throughout his life. His brothers would also become central figures in his story: Diego Giacometti, later a sculptor and indispensable studio assistant, and Bruno Giacometti, an architect. From an early age Alberto drew and modeled heads of those around him, a habit that never left him. After schooling in Switzerland he studied briefly at art schools in Geneva, then traveled to Italy to absorb ancient and Renaissance art. In 1922 he moved to Paris, enrolling at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where he studied sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle. He kept a lifelong attachment to the Louvre and to Egyptian, Cycladic, and African sculpture, which informed his sense of form and scale.

Paris, Surrealism, and a decisive break
By the mid-1920s Giacometti established himself in a tiny Montparnasse studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, a workspace he kept for the rest of his life. Early sculptures such as Spoon Woman and Gazing Head condensed the human form into spare, planar volumes. Around 1930 he moved into Surrealist circles led by Andre Breton and exhibited provocative objects like Suspended Ball, The Palace at 4 a.m., and Woman with Her Throat Cut. He developed friendships with artists and writers including Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, and met the British artist Isabel Rawsthorne, whose presence as model and companion proved crucial to his exploration of the gaze and the face. Yet another current drew him back to working directly from a model, a practice the Surrealists viewed with suspicion. By the mid-1930s he broke with Breton's group and concentrated on heads and figures observed in the studio, insisting on the intractable difficulty of seeing. Works like Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) mark this pivot toward a personal realism built from memory, perception, and doubt.

War years and the postwar return
During World War II, Giacometti spent several years in Switzerland, working in Geneva from 1942 to 1945. There he began the series of astonishingly small figures, some scarcely larger than a matchstick, which embodied distance and uncertainty in a wartime world. In Geneva he met Annette Arm; after the war she joined him in Paris, and they married in 1949. Diego, his brother, became his principal assistant, fabricator, and confidant, helping with plasters, molds, foundries, and patinas, while also developing his own sculptural and design work. The studio became a dense, chalk-dusted theater of heads, bodies, and standing figures. Giacometti re-entered the international scene with a 1948 exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, accompanied by Jean-Paul Sartre's influential essay that cast his work as a search for the absolute. In Paris, he frequented the intellectual milieu of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and he formed a close friendship with Samuel Beckett, whose laconic dramas resonated with the isolation and intensity of Giacometti's figures.

A language of figures, faces, and distance
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Giacometti developed the spare, elongated figures that became his signature. Man Pointing, Standing Woman, and the haunting group Women of Venice distilled the human presence into attenuated silhouettes whose surfaces bear the marks of incessant reworking. The Walking Man, the Chariot, and The Nose furthered this exploration of fragility, movement, and suspension in space. While celebrated as a sculptor, he pursued painting and drawing with equal intensity, often returning obsessively to the same sitters: Diego and Annette above all, but also his mother and close friends such as the writer Jean Genet. Isabel Rawsthorne reappeared as a vital subject after the war, and in his last years a young woman known simply as Caroline modeled for a series of portraits that register both immediacy and distance. Giacometti exhibited regularly with Galerie Maeght in Paris and with Pierre Matisse in New York. He collaborated with Beckett on the stark tree for a Paris staging of Waiting for Godot, and he was photographed and championed by figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Sylvester, Jacques Dupin, and Yves Bonnefoy, who helped articulate the stakes of his art.

Recognition, retrospectives, and final years
International recognition gathered steadily. He represented a central strand of postwar sculpture in major exhibitions and received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1962. Retrospectives in the mid-1960s, including large surveys in New York and London, confirmed his stature. Despite acclaim he kept to his austere routine in the cramped studio, reworking plaster and clay, scraping a canvas down to a haze, then starting again. The stubbornness of his process, shared daily with Diego and often with Annette seated in the chair opposite him, remained the core of his identity. Health problems shadowed his final years, but he continued to model and paint with acute concentration. He died in Switzerland in 1966 after a period of illness and was buried in Borgonovo, close to where his life and art began.

Legacy
Giacometti's legacy lies in a paradox: the extreme reduction of means that produces an overwhelming intensity of presence. His figures, seemingly thinned by distance and time, became emblems of the postwar human condition and influenced sculptors and painters across Europe and the Americas. The relationships that shaped his work are inseparable from that achievement: Giovanni's painterly example; Annetta's steadfast family sphere; Bruno's architect's eye; Diego's daily collaboration; Annette's patience as model and partner; Rawsthorne's catalytic gaze; and the companionship of Sartre, Beauvoir, Beckett, and other writers who recognized in his art a profound reckoning with seeing and being. Through sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking, he left a body of work that brings viewers back, again and again, to the head, the face, and the fragile measure of a human figure in space.

Our collection contains 18 quotes who is written by Alberto, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Deep - Art - Work - Loneliness.