Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, Switzerland, October 10, 1901 - Chur, Switzerland, January 11, 1966) was a Swiss sculptor and painter.

Biography

Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Val Bregaglia, in Switzerland, near the Italian border, where he grew up in an artistic environment. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, had been an impressionist painter, while his godfather, Cuno Amiet, was a Fauvist.

After finishing high school, he moved to Geneva to study painting, drawing and sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and to Paris, in 1922, to study at the Académie de the Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse under the tutelage of an associate of Rodin's, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism. However, he was more attracted to the Surrealist movement and by 1927, after his brother Diego had become his assistant, Alberto had begun showing his first Surrealist sculptures in the Salon des Tuileries . A short time later, he was already considered one of the most important surrealist sculptors of the time.

Living in an area as creative as Montparnasse, he began to associate with artists such as Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso, as well as writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Éluard and André Breton, for whom he wrote and drew in his publication Le surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. Between 1935 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpture on the human head, focusing mainly on the gaze. This was followed by a unique new artistic phase in which the statues of him began to stretch, elongating his limbs. At this time he paid a visit to Spain, despite being in the middle of the civil war.

During World War II, he lived in Geneva, where he met Annette Arm. In 1946 they both returned to Paris, where they were married in 1949. The marriage seemed to have a good effect on him as probably the most productive period of his career followed. It was his wife who gave him the opportunity to be constantly in contact with another human body. Other models had found posing for him no easy job, but Annette helped him enormously, patiently enduring hours-long sessions until Giacometti achieved what she was after.

Shortly thereafter, an exhibition of his work was organized at the Maeght Gallery in Paris and at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, for whose catalog his friend Jean- Paul Sartre wrote the introduction. A perfectionist, Giacometti was obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he saw them through his unique point of view of reality.

In 1954, he was commissioned to design a medallion depicting Henri Matisse, creating numerous drawings during the last months of the painter's life. In 1962 he received the grand prix for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, which led him to become an international celebrity.

On 3 February 2010, his sculpture The Walking Man I ('L'Homme qui marche I') was auctioned in London for £65 million (74.2 million euros, 104.3 million dollars), thus breaking the world record for a work of art sold at auction at that time, according to the house that handled the bid: Sotheby's.

The suspended ball

Reverso de un ticket de 100 francs Swiss con obras de Giacometti

It is a sculpture built as an open cage of iron bars inside which there is a sphere with a slit and hung from a rope that brushes, with a sway, the sharp edge of a half-recumbent piece in the shape of a crescent or of orange segment. There are two versions, one made of wood and the other in plaster.

This work inaugurates Alberto Giacometti's foray into the universe of the surrealist object. His discovery causes a small cataclysm within said artistic current. It will be André Breton who will discover it at the Pierre Loeb gallery in Paris, and his subsequent purchase will be responsible for the friendship between the two. The work comes at a turning point in surrealist poetics, which evolves from the exploration of the inner universe in the twenties (dreams, madness, hypnotic experiences) to the discovery of the real or invented universe of objects, towards 1930. In one of the first issues of the magazine Surrealism at the service of the Revolution, in 1931, Giacometti gave an account of the disturbing magnetism with which objects bewitched him: “All things… those that are near, and far away, all those that have passed and those to come, those that move, my friends, change (she walks past them, they move away), others approach, rise, descend, ducks in the water, here and there, in space, they go up and down…”

In the course of the 1930s, Giacometti insisted on the fact that the sculpture he made did not have the traces of his manipulation, nor of his physical imprint, nor of his aesthetic and formal calculations. “For years”, he writes in 1933, “I only make those sculptures that are offered to my mind already perfectly finished”. “The realization is only a material work that, for me, in all cases, does not present any difficulty. It's almost boring. It is in your head and you need to see it done, but the realization itself is annoying. If it could be done by others it would be even more satisfying! ” That is why he spoke of his works as“ projections ”that he wanted to see realized, but did not want to make himself.

However, the most innovative aspect is the use of real movement in plastic work, until then static. This is due to the fact that the ball can indeed be made to swing like a pendulum, which determines a perception of the work in its concrete and objective physical form and not as a plastic one. According to the author himself: “Despite my efforts, in those days I couldn't really tolerate a sculpture that limited itself to giving the illusion of movement (a leg moving forward, an arm raised, a head looking to the side). I could conceive movement only if it was real and effective, what's more, I wanted to give the sensation of being able to provoke it.” Movement is real, and therefore, the temporal medium in which it is inscribed is the real time of experience, stripped of all limits and, by definition, incomplete. This path of real movement and at the same time textual is a function of the meaning of surrealism insofar as it is installed simultaneously on the margins of the world and within it, sharing temporal conditions, but is formed under the pressure of an internal necessity.

By putting the ball and the crescent in the cubic volume of a cage, Giacometti can play with his two spatial registers. In this way, he produces an ambivalence: he confines the object in the cage's restricted scenic field, at the same time printing a real movement; he inscribes it in the space of the world, separating it from the things that surround it. The cage allows him to affirm the particularity of this situation and transform the whole into a kind of impenetrable glass sphere, fluctuating inside the real world. Part of real space and, at the same time, separated from it, the suspended ball and the crescent open a fissure in the continuous surface of reality. This sculpture captures an experience that we sometimes have while awake, an experience of discontinuity that insinuates itself between the different parts of the world.

This work also has a powerful capacity for erotic evocation that is enclosed in that iron cage, in which the tactile and pendulous attraction is a central element, although unconscious. Contained in a transparent frame, which accentuates the impression of isolation, the setting in motion of the object produces a violent emotion that is immediately associated with the irritating sensation of an unfulfilled desire, representing all the frustrations of the love device, although the masculine and feminine elements they are interchangeable. Dalí's description was very eloquent: “A wooden ball pierced by a feminine hole and suspended by a fine violin string hangs over a half moon whose edge lightly touches the cavity. The spectator is instinctively driven to slide the ball over the edge; sliding that, however, the length of the rope does not allow to perform more than half”.

It is inevitable to associate Suspended Ball with a childhood memory of Giacometti himself, regarding a large perforated stone that was found in the surroundings of his town, a “golden-colored monolith”, which It attracted magnetically and whose hole, "hostile and threatening", opened at its base into a humid cave in which little Alberto could barely fit lying down. As he himself recounted as an adult, the idea of this opening was both intolerable and attractive to him, and it occupied his attention and his games for several summers.

• Works for Giacometti at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, photographed by Paolo Monti.
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