Aziz Art July 2017

Alberto Giacometti
10 October 1901 – 11 January
1966
was a Swiss sculptor, painter,
draughtsman and printmaker. He
was born in the canton
Graubünden's southerly alpine
valley Val Bregaglia, as the eldest
of four children to Giovanni
Giacometti, a well-known post-
Impressionist painter.
Coming from an artistic
background, he was interested in
art from an early age.
Early life
Giacometti was born
in Borgonovo, now part of the
Switzerland municipality of
Bregaglia, near the Italian border.
He was a descendant of Protestant
refugees escaping the inquisition.
Alberto attended the Geneva
School of Fine Arts. His brothers
Diego (1902–85) and Bruno (1907–
2012) would go on to become
artists as well. Additionally,
Zaccaria
Giacometti, later professor of
constitutional law and chancellor
of the University of Zurich grew up
together with them, having been
orphaned at the age of 12 in 1905.
In 1922 he moved to Paris to study
under the sculptor Antoine
Bourdelle, an associate of Rodin. It
was there that Giacometti
experimented with cubism and
surrealism and came to be
regarded as one of the leading
surrealist sculptors. Among his
associates were Miró, Max Ernst,
Picasso, Bror Hjorth and Balthus.
Between 1936 and 1940,
Giacometti concentrated his
sculpting on the human head,
focusing on the sitter's gaze. He
preferred models he was close to,
his sister and the artist Isabel
Rawsthorne (then known as Isabel
Delmer). This was followed by a
phase in which his statues of Isabel
became stretched out; her limbs
elongated. Obsessed with creating
his sculptures exactly as he
envisioned through his unique view
of reality, he often carved until they
were as thin as nails and reduced to
the size of a pack of cigarettes,
much to his consternation. A friend
of his once said that if Giacometti
decided to sculpt you, "he would
make your head look like the blade
of a knife