Alberto Giacometti was born into an artistic lineage, with his father, Giovanni Giacometti, being a post-impressionist painter. This immersed Alberto into the realm of art from an early age, where he delved into drawing, painting, and sculpting.
Between 1919 and 1920, he pursued formal education in painting at the École des Beaux-Arts and in sculpture and drawing at the École des Arts et Métiers in Geneva. He moved to Paris in 1922, where he became a student at the Academy of the Grande Chaumière, under the tutelage of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle for sculpture.
During a trip to Italy in 1920, Giacometti encountered the works of Paul Cézanne and Alexander Archipenko at the Venice Biennale, which profoundly influenced his artistic sensibilities. He found inspiration in African and Egyptian art, the masterpieces of Giotto and Tintoretto, and Etruscan sculpture. These diverse influences converged in his early sculptures, exemplified by pieces like Torso (1925-1926) and Donna Cucchiaio (1926-1927), which bear traces of his fascination with tribal art.
In 1927, Giacometti opened a studio with his brother Diego. He first exhibited his sculptures at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris, and then held, with his father, his first exhibition in Switzerland, at Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. Between 1928 and 1935, Alberto Giacometti embraced Surrealism, and consequently, the prevailing themes of his works during this period revolved around imagination and the unconscious, aligning with the movement. Notably, his creations of these years were centered on exploring objects with symbolic significance. Pieces like Uomo e Donna (1928-1929) and particularly Sfera sospesa (1930) epitomized this exploration, as they are reduced to their elemental geometric attributes, mainly alluding to the realm of sexuality. Such themes persisted throughout the early 1930s, as seen in works like Gabbia (1931), which introduced the notion of sculpture as a transparent structure and introduced the concept of enclosure, a boundary as a framing device.
Giacometti’s experimentation and quest continued with pieces such as Oggetti mobili e muti (1931) e in Palazzo alle 4 del mattino (1932). The artist held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris in 1932, which was followed two years later by his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. The Surrealist era’s fascination with dreams and myths eventually gave way to a shift towards direct observation of reality, catalyzing a significant stylistic, material, and technical transformation in Alberto Giacometti’s work. An emblematic example of this shift is found in Le mele sul Buffet (1937), created in the aftermath of an exhibition commemorating the 30th anniversary of Paul Cézanne’s death, initially held in Paris and later in Basel. During this period, Giacometti’s decision to delve deeper into the study of reality was influenced by Cézanne’s artistic philosophy. Through Cézanne’s painting classes, Giacometti acquired a crucial conceptual framework for examining the relationships between objects in space and their representation on the pictorial plane.
In the early 1940s, the artist befriended Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. From 1942 he lived in Geneva, where he met publisher Albert Skira and in 1945, he exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery-museum, Art of This Century, in New York.
In Alberto Giacometti’s artistic evolution, the process of reductionism, which culminated in the years following World War II, became a defining feature of his relationship with reality throughout his career. This reductionist approach gave rise to a schematic naturism, characterized by a limited set of recurring themes that Giacometti continually revisited and reworked. These themes often revolved around familial relationships or landscapes. In 1946, the artist returned to Paris. Two years later he organized a new solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and he became friend with Samuel Beckett around 1951. In 1955 the Arts Council Gallery in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York dedicated to Giacometti major retrospectives. In 1961 he was awarded the Sculpture Prize of the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and, the following year, the Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, where he was granted a solo exhibition hall. Other major exhibitions were held in 1965 at the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That year, the French government awarded him the Grand Prix National d’Art.