Image © — @fondation_giacometti
Fondation Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti grew up in Switzerland in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley, a few kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933) was an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and artists. He shared his thoughts with his son on art and the nature of art
Image © — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Alberto Giacometti produced his first oil painting Still Life with Apples, circa 1915 and first sculpted bust Diego, circa 1914-1915 in his father's studioat the age of fourteen
His father and his godfather, the Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet(1868-1961) were two crucial figures in young Alberto’s artistic development. In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study, enrolling in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he attended classes given by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Drawings of nudes attest both to this apprenticeship and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, to the influence of Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Lége
Exhibitions
Dénoue, boucle à boucle, les cheveux d’une idole – avant que tes articulations se détachent
Huma Bhabha in response to Alberto Giacometti’s œuvre
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Fondation Giacometti, Paris
February 6 - May 24 2026
Curated Archive
Walking Man I — 1960
Alberto Giacometti
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A spare, elongated presence whose forward stride turns fragility, distance, and human persistence into sculptural force
Tall Woman IV — 1960
Alberto Giacometti
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A bronze architectural verticality, its attenuated body and roughened surface transforming human presence into a still, fragile monument
The Nose — 1947
Alberto Giacometti
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An exaggerated projection turning the face into a tense sense of distance, vulnerability, and psychological space
Tall Thin Head — 1954
Alberto Giacometti
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Formed and compressed bronze portrait with its narrow, eroded vertical form
Related Editorials
Alberto Giacometti at the 1962 Venice Biennale
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The Swiss artist’s Grand Prize for Sculpture marked a defining moment in modern art, as his attenuated figures transformed emptiness into atmosphere