Swiss sculptor of the walking, wire-thin bronze figures, made in a famously tiny, plaster-caked studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse that he kept for forty years. A Surrealist until they expelled him for working from life; Sartre and Genet wrote their best art criticism about him.
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor and painter whose thin, eroded standing figures are among the most recognisable images in modern art. He was born at Borgonovo in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland on 10 October 1901 and died at Chur, in eastern Switzerland, on 11 January 1966.
He worked in the same small studio in Montparnasse for almost forty years, a room about twenty-three square metres with a dirt floor, and he never moved to a larger one.
His sculptures are figures reduced almost to a line: a man walking, a woman standing with her arms at her sides, a head so narrow it nearly disappears from the side. They are about distance — how a person looks when seen from across a room, and how much of them is actually visible.
He was involved with the Surrealists in the early 1930s and was expelled from the group for going back to working from a live model. He spent the rest of his life trying to make a sculpture of a head that matched what he actually saw.
Alberto Giacometti was born on 10 October 1901 at Borgonovo, in the Bregaglia valley in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Graubünden, and grew up in the nearby village of Stampa.[1]
His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a well-known Post-Impressionist painter, and his godfather was the painter Cuno Amiet. His brother Diego worked with him all his life and made furniture. A second brother, Bruno, became an architect.
He drew and modelled from early childhood in his father's studio, and there was never any question of another profession.
In 1922 Giacometti moved to Paris and studied under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.[2]
In 1926 he took the studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, in the fourteenth arrondissement, that he kept for the rest of his life. It was small, damp and cold, and had no running water for years. The longer he stayed, he said, the bigger it grew. He intended to move as soon as he could afford to, and never did. Diego moved in nearby and became his assistant, model and casting technician for forty years.[1]
Between about 1930 and 1935 Giacometti was a member of the Surrealist group around André Breton, and made the sculptures that first got him noticed.[3]
They are strange objects rather than figures. In Suspended Ball a cleft wooden ball hangs on a string above a crescent it does not quite touch. The Palace at 4 a.m. is a cage of thin sticks holding a skeletal bird and a standing figure. Woman with Her Throat Cut is a flattened bronze creature laid on the floor.
In 1935 he went back to working from a live model, which the Surrealists regarded as a return to the academic dead. Breton is said to have demanded to know why he needed a model when everyone knew what a head looked like. Giacometti was expelled from the group and spent the next five years trying, without success, to model a head as he actually saw it.[4]
From 1935 to 1940 Giacometti worked almost every day from a model — his brother Diego, or a professional — trying to make a head as he actually perceived it, and destroyed nearly everything.
He ran into the problem that shaped the rest of his work. When he worked from memory rather than from a sitter, the figures came out tiny. Trying to make a figure the size it appeared from across a room, he found it shrank to a few centimetres, and several disappeared under his fingers.[4]
He left Paris at the end of 1941 and spent the rest of the war in Geneva, working in a hotel room. Everything he made in those years fitted into six matchboxes when he carried it back to Paris in 1945.[1]
After the war the figures suddenly grew tall, and stayed thin. This is the work everyone knows, made from 1947 onwards: Man Pointing, Standing Woman, The Dog, and the Piazza and Forest groups. The best known is Walking Man, L'Homme qui marche, the life-size striding bronze of 1960 that now appears on the Swiss hundred-franc note.
The surface is pitted and worked over, so the bronze looks eroded. The figures are elongated far past human proportion and stand with their feet on heavy bases, as if pinned. Seen from the front they have almost no depth.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the catalogue essay for Giacometti's 1948 New York exhibition. He described the sculptures as figures caught at a fixed distance and always about to disappear. That reading made Giacometti the visual equivalent of existentialism for a generation of critics, and he only partly accepted it.[3]
Giacometti's method was to keep going. He painted and modelled the same few sitters — Diego, his wife Annette, the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, the Paris prostitute Caroline — hundreds of times, working over each piece until it collapsed or was taken away from him.
He said that he was never able to finish anything, that every head defeated him, and that failure was the condition of the work rather than an interruption of it. Photographs of the studio show plaster everywhere, canvases stacked, and the dirt floor covered in grey dust.
He married Annette Arm in 1949. She modelled for many of the standing figures.[1]
By the 1950s Giacometti was internationally famous. He won the sculpture prize at the Venice Biennale in 1962 and exhibited at the major museums. Sartre wrote about him, and so did Jean Genet, whose essay of 1957, L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, is reportedly the only text about himself that Giacometti fully admired. Samuel Beckett asked him to make the tree for a 1961 Paris production of Waiting for Godot.[2]
In 1960 he was commissioned to make figures for the plaza of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and worked on them for years without ever agreeing to install them.
He was struck by a car in Paris in 1938 and walked with a stick afterwards, and he smoked and drank heavily and slept badly for decades.
Giacometti died of heart disease and chronic bronchitis at the hospital in Chur, Switzerland, on 11 January 1966, aged sixty-four. He is buried at Borgonovo, next to his parents.
His studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron was kept as he left it. Its contents, and the walls he had drawn on, are now in the Institut Giacometti in Paris.[2]
Giacometti worked on a problem few other sculptors were addressing: how to make a sculpture of a person that records the act of looking rather than the shape of a body. The thin figures are not stylised or expressive distortions. They are the result of forty years of trying to model what a person actually looks like at twenty paces, including the space around them.
The other reason he matters is the persistence. He worked in one small room for forty years, destroyed most of what he made, and said constantly that he could not do it. The work that survived is now among the most valuable in the world: Walking Man I sold at Sotheby's in 2010 for 104.3 million dollars, then a record for any sculpture at auction.
Jean Genet sat for Giacometti as well, and his 1957 essay on the studio came out of those sittings. Earlier, in 1920, the young Giacometti travelled through Italy looking hardest at Tintoretto and Giotto, before he ever reached Paris.
Born on 10 October at Borgonovo in the Bregaglia valley, in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Graubünden, son of the Post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti.
The family settles at Stampa. Alberto draws and models in his father's studio from childhood.
Enters school at Schiers and makes his first oil paintings and sculpted heads.
Studies briefly at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva.
Travels to Italy with his father, and sees Venetian painting, Giotto and Egyptian sculpture, which stay with him.
Moves to Paris and studies under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Arrives in Paris in January to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.
Exhibits at the Salon des Tuileries. His brother Diego joins him in Paris.
Takes the small studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the fourteenth arrondissement, intending to move as soon as he can afford to. He keeps it for forty years.
Shows Suspended Ball, which brings him into the Surrealist group around André Breton.
Has his first solo exhibition, in Paris. Makes The Palace at 4 a.m.
Makes Woman with Her Throat Cut, a flattened bronze figure to be placed on the floor.
His father Giovanni dies.
Returns to working from a live model. The Surrealists regard this as a return to academic art and expel him.
Works daily from Diego and from professional models, and destroys almost everything he makes.
Is struck by a car in the place des Pyramides in Paris and walks with a stick for the rest of his life.
Meets Samuel Beckett in Paris. Goes home to Switzerland and spends the war in a Geneva hotel room.
Meets Annette Arm in Geneva.
Returns to Paris carrying everything he made during the war in six matchboxes.
The figures suddenly grow tall and stay thin. Makes Man Pointing and the first walking figures.
Has his first New York exhibition, at Pierre Matisse's gallery, with a catalogue essay by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Marries Annette Arm, who models for many of the standing figures.
Makes the group compositions, including The Forest and The Glade.
Has retrospectives in London and New York.
Shows the Women of Venice at the Venice Biennale.
Is commissioned to make figures for the plaza of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and works on them for years without agreeing to install them.
Makes the tree for Samuel Beckett's Paris production of Waiting for Godot.
Wins the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.
Meets Caroline, a Paris prostitute who becomes one of his main sitters in the last years.
Has retrospectives at the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louisiana museum in Denmark. James Lord sits for a portrait and later writes a book about the eighteen days it took.
Dies of heart disease and chronic bronchitis at the hospital in Chur on 11 January, aged sixty-four, and is buried at Borgonovo next to his parents.
Walking Man sells at auction for what is then a record price for any sculpture.
The Institut Giacometti opens in Paris, holding the contents of the rue Hippolyte-Maindron studio and the walls he drew on.
Met
Giacometti belonged to the Surrealist group around Breton from about 1930, and Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m. date from those years. Breton expelled him in 1935 after he went back to working from a live model, which the group regarded as a return to academic art.
Collaborated with · 1935
Before the tall thin figures made him famous, Giacometti made lamps, furniture and decorative objects. When Schiaparelli moved her salon into the Hôtel de Fontpertuis at 21 place Vendôme in 1935, the interiors were designed by Jean-Michel Frank working with Giacometti, and the house's catalogue of its artist collaborations lists jewellery by Giacometti and a lighting piece, the Colonne Luminaire. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs names him among her key collaborators alongside Man Ray, Cocteau, Dalí, Oppenheim and Bérard.
Met · 1937
When Beckett settled in Paris in the summer of 1937 his closest company was among painters and sculptors rather than writers — the van Velde brothers, Marcel Duchamp, and Giacometti, whose plaster-caked Montparnasse studio was a short walk away. The friendship left one visible object: for the 1961 Paris revival of En attendant Godot at the Odéon, Giacometti made the spindly white tree that is the play's only scenery, the two of them reworking it late into the night.
Met
Balthus and Giacometti belonged to overlapping Paris circles and maintained a friendship across their mature careers.
Met · 1954
Sartre introduced Genet and Giacometti in 1954; Genet sat repeatedly in the sculptor's studio, was portrayed by him, and wrote L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Recruited in 1931 for the dream-objects - Suspended Ball, The Palace at 4 a.m. - and expelled in 1935 for the heresy of working from a live model. Everything he is now famous for came after the expulsion.
Depicted in · Photograph
The Museum of Modern Art records Alberto Giacometti as the sitter on its object page and names him in the title. He crosses the rue d'Alesia in the rain with his raincoat pulled over his head, in the 14th arrondissement, the arrondissement of the studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron he took in 1926 and kept for forty years. The same museum holds a second Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait of him, made outside that studio in 1962.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Giacometti Going Out for Breakfast, Paris, 1963, 232.1985; Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Giacometti Outside His Studio, 1962, 1241.1969; Alberto Giacometti: Biography — Fondation Giacometti
A Swiss sculptor and painter, born in the Bregaglia valley in 1901 and died in Switzerland in 1966. His tall, thin, eroded standing figures are among the most recognisable images in modern art.
Because he was modelling how a person looks at a distance, including the space around them, rather than the shape of a body. Working from memory his figures shrank until some disappeared under his fingers; after the war they grew tall but stayed narrow, with almost no depth when seen from the front.
For about five years, from 1930 to 1935, and he made Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m. in that period. He was expelled from the group in 1935 for going back to working from a live model, which the Surrealists regarded as a return to academic art.
In one small studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, about twenty-three square metres, with a dirt floor. He took it in 1926 meaning to move as soon as he could afford to, and kept it for forty years. Its contents are now in the Institut Giacometti in Paris.
He wrote the catalogue essay for Giacometti's New York show in 1948. In it he called the sculptures figures fixed at a distance, always about to vanish. Critics took that up, and for years Giacometti was treated as the sculptor of existentialism. He only partly accepted the label.
He said not. He worked over the same few sitters — his brother Diego, his wife Annette, and others — hundreds of times, destroyed most of what he made, and said repeatedly that every head defeated him. He treated the failure as the condition of the work rather than an interruption of it.
Associated with · 1931–1935
Recruited in 1931 for the dream-objects - Suspended Ball, The Palace at 4 a.m. - and expelled in 1935 for the heresy of working from a live model. Everything he is now famous for came after the expulsion.
Met
Giacometti belonged to the Surrealist group around Breton from about 1930, and Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m. date from those years. Breton expelled him in 1935 after he went back to working from a live model, which the group regarded as a return to academic art.
Collaborated with · 1935
Before the tall thin figures made him famous, Giacometti made lamps, furniture and decorative objects. When Schiaparelli moved her salon into the Hôtel de Fontpertuis at 21 place Vendôme in 1935, the interiors were designed by Jean-Michel Frank working with Giacometti, and the house's catalogue of its artist collaborations lists jewellery by Giacometti and a lighting piece, the Colonne Luminaire. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs names him among her key collaborators alongside Man Ray, Cocteau, Dalí, Oppenheim and Bérard.
Met · 1937
When Beckett settled in Paris in the summer of 1937 his closest company was among painters and sculptors rather than writers — the van Velde brothers, Marcel Duchamp, and Giacometti, whose plaster-caked Montparnasse studio was a short walk away. The friendship left one visible object: for the 1961 Paris revival of En attendant Godot at the Odéon, Giacometti made the spindly white tree that is the play's only scenery, the two of them reworking it late into the night.
Met
Balthus and Giacometti belonged to overlapping Paris circles and maintained a friendship across their mature careers.
Met · 1954
Sartre introduced Genet and Giacometti in 1954; Genet sat repeatedly in the sculptor's studio, was portrayed by him, and wrote L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti.
Depicted in · 1963
The Museum of Modern Art records Alberto Giacometti as the sitter on its object page and names him in the title. He crosses the rue d'Alesia in the rain with his raincoat pulled over his head, in the 14th arrondissement, the arrondissement of the studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron he took in 1926 and kept for forty years. The same museum holds a second Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait of him, made outside that studio in 1962.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Alberto Giacometti and their work.
Reference article cross-checked for the Swiss childhood, the Paris studio, the expulsion from the Surrealists and his death.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Alberto Giacometti page.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Alberto Giacometti. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
Explore more resources