Fifty years ago, Swiss sculptor Giacometti passed away

Chur - He was one of the most significant sculptors of the 20th century. The Swiss Alberto Giacometti, who passed away fifty years ago, on January 11, 1966, also painted and drew. Today, his works are among the most expensive in the world - his bronze sculpture The Walking Man sold at auction in New York last May for $141.3 million (3.8 billion CZK), which was the highest price ever achieved for a sculpture at auction.

Giacometti was born on October 10, 1901, in Borgonovo, an Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. His father Giovanni was also a painter. Alberto attended art school in Geneva. In 1922, he moved to Paris to continue his studies. There, he experimented with cubism and surrealism. He befriended and collaborated with Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso, even becoming a member of the Surrealist group, but was expelled in 1934 after a quarrel with André Breton. At the turn of the 1930s and 1940s, a certain turning point can be observed in his work, distancing from surrealism, which culminated in the post-war period.

In 1947, the gallerist Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri Matisse, organized an exhibition of Giacometti's sculptures in New York. Alongside older works, his newest creations—elongated male and female figures and several portrait busts—were presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition was introduced in the accompanying catalog by Jean-Paul Sartre in the essay The Search for the Absolute, in which he emphasized Giacometti's ability to breathe life into sculptures and their existential urgency. The American audience received him enthusiastically, and in the following years, he quickly gained international fame.

No exhibition or collection of 20th-century art could henceforth be without Giacometti. Alongside his sculptural work, he also began to focus more on painting and created several portraits of his relatives and friends. At the Venice Biennale in 1962, he received the Grand Prize for sculpture and presented a project for a group of sculptures for the space in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank skyscraper in New York, a commission he had dreamed of since the 1930s. Before it could be realized, Giacometti died of heart failure in January 1966.