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Giacometti, Alberto
born: 1901 Stampa, Switzerland
died: 1966 Chur
Alberto Giacometti received his first training from his father, artist Giovanni Giacometti. After brief studies at art schools in Geneva, he went to Paris in
1922 and spent five years in the sculpture class of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. Despite this traditional schooling, Giacometti was influenced by modern sculpture from an early date, his initial works bearing affinities with Cubism and Constantin Brancusi. By
1929 Giacometti was creating open, cage-like, sometimes movable structures whose composition employed elements from Constructivism and whose details recalled the formal idiom of Surrealism. This Surrealistic period in Giacometti's work ended in about
1935. In the 1940s he went on to develop an approach in which figures, or parts of figures, were pared down to emaciated, elongated, often veritably skeletal ometti configurations with roughened, as if tormented surfaces. After the war, apart from his work in sculpture and the large-scale projects which recognition had brought, Giacometti devoted himself to oil painting and printmaking as well.
His drawings were based on complex skeins of line, gradually and rhythmically condensed into an image, and heightened by painterly halftones made with fingers or stump. The Nose combines structural elements with a male bust rendered with extreme distortion and a highly textured, as if dissolved surface. The bronze head is suspended within a rectangular box made of thin rods. The nose, elongated to an almost sword-like shape, protrudes from the enclosed space, and the mouth seems open in a scream.
The elongated neck provides compositional - and physical - balance. Sculptural and psychological factors are wonderfully interwoven in this work.
Giacometti had already begun to experiment with box and cage configurations before the war. The interplay between a spatial enclosure of objects, which in view of the open grid implies a mental, psychological process, and an actual penetration of this illusionistic barrier, was also something that intrigued the Surrealists.
The French title of Place can connote place, plaza, or city square, but the subtitle is straightforward: Composition with Three Figures and a Head. Though the four elements indeed define a situation in space.
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