Tuesday Art ATTACK- Alberto Giacometti "Walking Man"

Alberto Giacometti was born on the 10th of October in 1901. He grew up in the Borgonovo, now a fraction of the Swiss municipality of Bregaglia, near the Swiss Italian border. During his childhood Giacometti spent lots of time with his father Giovanni Giacometti, who is a moderately well known post-impressionist painter, which sparked his interests in the arts at an early age.

When old enough he left home and attended the Genoa School of Fine Arts with his two brothers Diego and Bruno. After finishing his studies in 1922 Giacometti, like so many others of his time, moved to Paris. Once in Paris he apprenticed under renowned sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. During his studies with Bourdelle he learned classical techniques to approach sculpture as well as newer and contemporary voices of the art. Giacometti became particularly interested in cubism and surrealism. His interests in surrealism eventually led to him becoming recognized as one of the head surrealist sculptors of the time.

During a period ranging between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti focused his attentions on sculpting the human head. This phase transitioned into perhaps his most famous body of work of stretched figures. Giacometti began creating surreal figures that he made extraordinarily thin and he created them with very stretched proportions. As he kept making these figures they grew larger and lager in size as well as thinner. He began incorporating more movement in the figures instead of simply making them stagnant. He received lots of publicity and fame for these works.

Giacometti was asked in 1958 to sculpt a monumental sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. He began the commission which resulted in the creation of four massive woman figures, but the project was never completed because Giacometti felt very unsatisfied with the relationship between his sculpture and its site. Soon after, in 1962 Giacometti was awarded the highest award in sculpture for his Venice Biennale. Receiving this award boosted Giacometti's already high credibility as an artist even further. His work was now in high demand and he continually held shows for the next several years throughout Europe. In his later years Giacometti also produced a number of lithographs, drawings, and prints that are often overlooked. Several of these are collected in the books Giacometti- The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawing and Paris Sans Fin.

Alberto Giacometti died in 1966 in Chur, Switzerland, leaving a lasting legacy on the world of contemporary sculpture.