On October 10th, 1901, Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland under his father Giovanni Giacometti, who was a famous painter who mainly did impressionism arts. By the influence of his dad, his early works were based on impressionism and were more realistic paintings of mostly landscape or his families and friends.
At the age of nineteen, he met an old man called Meursault in a train. They talked for a while, and Meursault, impressed by Giacometti's knowledge and passion on art, later puts several advertisements on newspaper looking for him. In the end, Meursault succeeded to find Giacometti and suggested Giacometti to go on a trip with him, everything paid by Meursualt. Giacometti says yes, and they travel to Italy. However, as soon as their travel started, Meursualt passed away from sickness, and this caused great trauma for Giacometti.
World War I along with the death of Meursault made Giacometti think about the borderline between life and death. He started to question if one could tell a sleeping person apart from a dead person. From that thought, he concluded that what determines life was in the eyes. From that point on, he began his challenge to blow life into the eyes of his sculptures.
This piece above is his last piece that was unfinished but came out to the world by his brother Diego Giacometti after he left the world in 1965 due to a heart disease. Today, this piece is praised for the stare that seems blank but to hold some sort of power.
World War II also influenced his art works greatly. The irony of the fact that humans were suffering from the system they made and were killing with and dying from the weapons they made caused Giacometti to think about essence of life and the final destination to be reached. That was when he started to make the sculptures very thin, only very bare form left without any accessories on the body, which contradicted a lot with previous sculptures that mostly had masculine body with dynamic postures.
Another reason why his sculptures were so significant was also because of the unique way he sculpted them. Artists of that time mostly worked either by sticking clays inward to form shapes or by using sharp tools to carve out hard materials. However, Giacometti took pieces of clay off, leaving clear marks of how his hands went through the piece.
He also was inspired a lot by watching people in Paris walk by everyday. He found walking and moving fascinating and figured that this kind of lightness was a symbol of liveliness that the dead could not have. Inspired by this, he began making walking sculptures.
Alberto Giacometti created many sculptures that are still remembered as one of the most significant arts of the history. He broke the existed frame of the art world and challenged many artists by creating his very own arts. His arts covered a lot about the contradictory of life and death or lightness and weight. No matter how many years pass, his arts will forever have life that brings the same significant effect on people.
