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 worked for forty years in one small room at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse — about 23 square metres, no running water for years, every surface caked in plaster — and refused all his life to move out of it, even as the figures made there entered every major museum in the world. 'The longer I stayed, the bigger it grew,' he said of it.
What was made there changed shape twice. The Surrealist decade produced enigmatic objects — The Palace at 4 a.m., Suspended Ball — before André Breton's movement expelled him in 1935 for the heresy of working from a live model. The war years shrank his figures to matchbox size, an entire output carried back from Geneva in six matchboxes; and from 1947 came the opposite and the icon: the wire-thin, rough-surfaced walking men and standing women, life-size presences worn down to what remains when everything removable is removed. Jean-Paul Sartre framed them as existentialism in bronze; Jean Genet, sitting for him, wrote the little book about the studio that many consider the best thing ever written about a working artist.
Giacometti was born on 10 October 1901 at Borgonovo, in the Italian-speaking Bregaglia valley of the Swiss Alps, the eldest son of the post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti. The household ran on art: Alberto drew and modelled from childhood with his father's encouragement, studied in Geneva, travelled Italy for Tintoretto and Giotto, and in January 1922 arrived in Paris to study sculpture under Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière.
In 1926 he took the studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron and never left it; his brother Diego moved in as assistant, bronze-caster and daily model, a working partnership that lasted until Alberto's death. The Surrealists recruited him in 1931 on the strength of the dream-objects he was making — Suspended Ball's swinging wedge, the skeletal Palace at 4 a.m., Woman with Her Throat Cut splayed on the floor — and expelled him in 1935 when he returned to working from the model, which Breton considered a betrayal of the imagination. Giacometti's verdict on the expulsion was a shrug: everything he had done since mattered more.
He spent the war in Geneva, and the work underwent its strangest phase: the figures shrank. Working from memory — of people seen at a distance, on boulevards, at dusk — he found each figure reducing under his fingers until it stood a few centimetres tall on a disproportionate base; anything larger felt false. When he returned to Paris in 1945, the entire production of three and a half years travelled with him in six matchboxes.
Then the figures grew — but only upward. From 1947 came the sculptures everyone now knows: Walking Man, Standing Woman, Man Pointing — life-size and taller, wire-thin, their surfaces worked and reworked into ridges of bronze, presences at the exact distance of a stranger seen across a street. Jean-Paul Sartre's catalogue essays made them existentialism's official images; Giacometti himself talked only of trying to copy what he actually saw, and of failing every day, which was the engine of the work.
He married Annette Arm in 1949, and she joined Diego in the small rotation of models he painted and modelled obsessively — the grey frontal portraits, restarted sitting after sitting, that occupied his last fifteen years alongside the bronzes. Jean Genet sat too, and his 1957 essay L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti — the plaster dust, the grey, the beauty of the work's wounds — became a classic of writing about art, reportedly the only text about himself Giacometti fully admired.
The 1962 Venice Biennale gave him its grand prize for sculpture and the fame he had never sought; the studio and the routines did not change. He died of heart disease and bronchitis at the cantonal hospital in Chur, Switzerland, on 11 January 1966, and is buried at Borgonovo beside his parents. In 2010 Walking Man I sold at auction for 104.3 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a sculpture — made by a man who for years had no running water in the one room he refused to leave.
Born on 10 October at Borgonovo in the Swiss Bregaglia valley, son of the painter Giovanni Giacometti.
Arrives in Paris in January to study under Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière.
Takes the tiny studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron; his brother Diego joins as assistant and model. He keeps the room for the rest of his life.
Joins the Surrealists; The Palace at 4 a.m. and Suspended Ball date from the movement years.
Expelled from Surrealism for returning to work from a live model.
Returns from wartime Geneva with three and a half years of sculpture in six matchboxes — the figures had shrunk to centimetres.
The tall thin figures begin: Walking Man, Standing Woman, Man Pointing.
Marries Annette Arm, who becomes his most constant painted model.
Jean Genet publishes L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, the little classic of the plaster-grey studio.
Grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.
Dies at Chur, Switzerland, on 11 January; buried at Borgonovo. The rue Hippolyte-Maindron room had been his studio to the end.
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.
Because that is what remained when he made what he actually saw. After the war years — when his figures from memory shrank to matchbox size — he began working life-size again in 1947, and the figures came out attenuated: bodies at the distance of a stranger across a street, pared to presence itself, their surfaces worked into rough ridges. Sartre read them as images of existential solitude; Giacometti insisted he was only trying, and failing, to copy reality.
One small room at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse — about 23 square metres, taken in 1926 when he was unknown and kept until his death in 1966, long after he could afford anything. It had no running water for years, plaster crusted every surface, and the walls carried decades of sketches. Jean Genet's essay The Studio of Alberto Giacometti (1957) made the room itself famous; Giacometti said that the longer he stayed, the bigger it grew.
For four years. André Breton's movement claimed him in 1931 on the strength of dream-objects like Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m., and expelled him in 1935 when he went back to working from a live model — a return to reality the doctrine could not tolerate. Everything the world now knows him for came after the expulsion.
Walking Man (L'Homme qui marche, 1960) — the life-size striding bronze figure that appears on the Swiss 100-franc note. A cast, Walking Man I, sold at Sotheby's in 2010 for 104.3 million dollars, at the time the highest auction price ever paid for a sculpture. Man Pointing, Standing Woman and the Dog are the other icons of the post-1947 style.
Mostly the same few people, thousands of times: his brother Diego, who was also his lifelong studio assistant and bronze-finisher; his wife Annette, married in 1949; and in the last years the circle of friends who sat for him — the writer Jean Genet, the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, and Caroline, a young woman of the Montparnasse night world who became his late companion and model. He needed the sitter present, restarted endlessly, and described finishing as merely abandoning.
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.
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