- Title: SWITZERLAND: Art exhibition of works by Alberto Giacometti
- Date: 10th June 2001
- Summary: (L3)ZURICH, SWITZERLAND (JUNE 06, 2001) (REUTERS) SCU STILL PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING ALBERTO GIACOMETTI WORKING IN HIS STUDIO
- Embargoed: 25th June 2001 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
- Country: Switzerland
- Topics: Arts
- Reuters ID: LVA5YFJYJJ0VH6VE9AA3BJIJUXQE
- Story Text: Alberto Giacometti, best known for his excessively spindly bronze sculptures, would have celebrated his 100th birthday on October 2001. A major exhibition, featuring the largest collection of his work ever, some of which have never been shown on public, is commemorating the Swiss artist's centenary.
Alberto Giacometti, best known for his thin bronze sculptures, was born on October 10, 1901, in Borgonovo near Stampa in the southeastern Swiss Graubunden mountain area near the Italian border.
A centenary exhibition, bringing together the largest collection of his work ever and tracing all his stages, is being held in the Kunsthaus museum in Zurich, Switzerland.
The young Giacometti started painting in his father's studio in the tradition of the time, with nature-like representations of still life and portraits.
He started school in Schiers, near Chur, but soon decided he wanted to become a sculptor and attended art school in Geneva for a while before deciding to go to Paris and enroll in the classes of Antoine Bourdelle, himself a student of French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
But he soon broke out of this classical mould and went his own way, influenced by tribal art.
Paris at that time was a hotbed for surrealist art. In 1930, the art dealer Pierre Loeb organised an exhibition of Joan Miro, Hans Arp and Giacometti which featured the work "suspended ball".
In a cage-like frame, a ball was suspended on a thread and held in place just above a banana shaped object. An incision in the ball at a place near the banana allowed for erotic connotations and the work was highly appreciated by the grand master of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton.
Giacometti was invited to join the group and he was an ardent participant in the group's manifestations, be it in art or in the cafe's of Montparnasse.
He did his most mysterious work at that time, such as "woman with her throat cut", a spider-like creature with female features and a sliced throat, and the enigmatic "The palace at 4. A.M" made of wood, string and glass. This is a wiry three-dimensional scene which he said represented the break-up of a love affair.
Four years later he was evicted from the group. The reason was partly that he had started sculpting realistic busts again and the surrealists were only allowed to represent objects and partly over the commercial work Alberto and his younger brother and assistant Diego were doing for a society interior designer of that time, Jean-Michel Frank.
Giacometti made contact with another powerful cultural grouping of pre-war Paris as he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and mingled in the circle of the existentialists. He left Paris for Geneva in December 1941 after the German occupation.
There he had a troubled time working on very small figurines. Bjorn Quellenberg, the Kunsthaus museum press officer says, "He was thinking of how small men have become during the war (WW2)."
Giacometti returned to Paris after the war with matchboxes full of his small statuettes, having borrowed money from his Geneva companion Annette Arm for the train ticket.
After an accident in which he was run over by a car on Place des Pyramides and had to be treated in hospital for a broken foot, having to use a walking stick for many months, Giacometti resumed making statues of bigger size, sometimes even life-size, in what is now called his mature period.
Hauntingly melancholic frail statues of walking men and standing women became his trademark.
He also continued to paint, using much grey, earth colours and black, sombre pictures, portraits mainly, that still seem very lively.
He distorted the proportions of body parts, big hands and small heads, to pull the attention of the viewer to the face which was the point of gravity in the work.
In his quest for perfection, he made large series of works using the same subject such as busts of his brother Diego.
Dissatisfied, he destroyed a lot of his work, but much was being sold before he could change his opinion.
Alberto Giacometti died on January 11, 1966, in the hospital in Chur in Switzerland and was buried in the native village with many representatives of Swiss and French officialdom on hand.
This unique retrospective lasts until September 2 before moving to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it will open on October 10, 2001. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: Video restrictions: parts of this video may require additional clearances. Please see ‘Business Notes’ for more information.