He shrank figures to match the distance of memory
Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) once watched his clay shrink in terror until pieces stood only seven centimetres tall—the scale of how far he felt from the model. After the war those same figures stretched into the skeletal walkers that made him world-famous.
Born in Borgonovo to post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, Alberto trained in Geneva then moved to Paris in 1922 to study with Antoine Bourdelle. From 1926 he lived in a tiny Montparnasse studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron that doubled as home for the rest of his life. Cubist and Surrealist experiments brought him into André Breton’s circle from 1929 until expulsion in 1935; around then he abandoned Surrealism for relentless figurative looking.
Between 1938 and 1944 his sculptures topped out at about seven centimetres, because he tried to rebuild from memory what he had seen at a real viewing distance. Friends joked that if he sculpted you, your head would become a knife blade. After refuge in Switzerland during World War II he married Annette Arm in 1949; as pieces grew taller they grew thinner, and Annette and brother Diego became his chief models. Painting, long secondary, matched sculpture’s intensity after 1957 in nearly monochrome late canvases.
The 1962 Venice Biennale grand prize for sculpture sealed international fame. Even then he destroyed or postponed works, chasing an unreachable exactness. A Chase Manhattan plaza commission in 1958 exposed his unease with New York skyscraper life he had never seen. In 1965, despite failing health, he traveled for a MoMA show and prepared Paris sans fin, 150 lithographs. Rough, eroded surfaces—like winter trees stripped of leaves—became his signature answer to how a person occupies space.
Source: Alberto Giacometti
