ABOUT
贾科梅蒂（1901– 1966）是瑞士雕塑家，画家，制图员和版画家。贾科梅蒂的艺术理念深受幻觉真实的影响，他试图抓住在外部世界感觉到的瞬息即逝的幻觉，并完整地反映出人类形象。他的作品将单纯的人类形象与侵蚀他们人性的空间整合起来，以寓言的方式表达了深切的孤独感、人的焦虑和被剥夺了的传统慰藉。
作品深刻地揭示了人类在特定历史时期的生存状态。作品常常呈现出一种纤瘦、孤独的人体形象，这种形象不仅是对客观物象的再现，更是对人类在面对灾难时的恐惧、脆弱、孤独与无助的深刻反映。这种表现手法使得他的作品具有鲜明的时代精神，体现了对人类生存状态的深刻关怀和反思。
Alberto Giacometti grew up in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley in Switzerland, just a few kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933), an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and artists, frequently shared his thoughts on art and its essence with his son. At the age of fourteen, Alberto created his first oil painting, "Still Life with Apples" (circa 1915), and his first sculpted bust, "Diego" (circa 1914-1915), in his father's studio. His artistic development was significantly influenced by his father and his godfather, the Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet (1868-1961). In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he was taught by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. His drawings of nudes reflect this apprenticeship period and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, show the influence of Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Léger.
It was in Switzerland, during the Second World War, that Giacometti conceived the sculpture "Woman with Chariot" in 1944-45, which served as the prototype for his postwar standing figures. This sculpture, depicting his English friend Isabel from memory, exemplifies Giacometti's research on the space of representation between 1945 and 1965. The standing figure, facing forward with arms beside the body and an expressionless face, was either placed on pedestals isolating it from the ground or incorporated into "cages" creating a virtual space. Some compositions, like "The Glade," were positioned on raised flat surfaces above pedestal level to establish a space parallel to ours. The standing female figures, presented as allusive silhouettes sometimes reduced to a line, were invariably approached through successive phases conveyed by series. "Four Women on a Base" and "Four Figurines on a Stand" materialize two visions of four standing women seen from a distance in different circumstances. In "Three Men Walking," Giacometti attempted to capture the fleeting sight of figures in motion in sculpture. In 1950, he created a series of sculptures depicting a clearing where trees were sculpted as women and stones as men's heads, an image he later pushed to its extreme in a life-size piece.
of the existence of everything."
In 1941, Giacometti met philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who authored two pivotal essays on the artist's work, published in 1948 and 1954, addressing the issue of perception. Equally significant were his conversations with Sartre's Japanese translator and philosophy professor, Isaku Yanaihara, who served as Giacometti's model between 1956 and 1961. In 1948, the French state, eager to honor French intellectuals and artists, commissioned Giacometti to design a medal dedicated to Sartre, although it was never produced; however, the design drawings survive. Between 1951 and his death, Giacometti created a series of "dark heads," which, alongside some anonymous sculpted heads, gave concrete form to the concept of the "generic man." Sartre later summarized this idea in his 1964 novel Les mots: "A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him." This represents Giacometti's most essential contribution to the history of portrait art in the 20th century.
Giacometti creates a system of equivalences between the human figure and nature, where busts are likened to mountains, standing figures to trees, and heads to stones. In sunlight, the mountain's vibration resembles breathing, and like trees, humans are caught in an unending cycle of growth and death. This theme is featured on the door he completed in 1956 for the Kaufmann family vault in Pennsylvania, USA. In 1958, inspired by a nighttime vision, he hastily painted a picture unifying the trilogy of man, tree, and mountain. However, for Giacometti, it was the most ordinary things that held the unknown and the wonderful. He noted that the landscape visible from his Stampa studio window was constantly changing, allowing him to "spend every day looking at the same garden, the same trees, and the same backdrop," or, in Paris, to gaze for hours at the small house across the street, which he painted from his doorway. He marveled at "all the beautiful landscapes that can be painted without changing one's position, the most ordinary, anonymous, banal, yet beautiful landscapes imaginable."
In December 1958, Giacometti, through his New York dealer Pierre Matisse, received an invitation to submit a project for a monument destined for the square being constructed in front of the new Chase Manhattan Bank skyscraper in Manhattan. In February 1959, Gordon Bunshaft, the architect of this urban complex, provided Giacometti with the dimensions for a model of the square to aid the artist, who had never visited the United States, in visualizing the space. Giacometti decided to bring the three motifs that had been recurring in his work since 1948—a gigantic standing female figure, a large walking man, and a monumental head on the ground—to life on a grand scale, interrelating them within the monument. This monument, for the first time, allowed spectators to enter his captivating world, where women took the form of trees, heads resembled stones, and fleeting shadows of walking men traversed a magical glade. However, the monument never materialized in New York due to Giacometti's withdrawal from the competition in 1961. Instead, he chose to cast each sculpture in bronze separately and exhibited the first version of the set at the 1962 Venice Biennale. Another version was installed in 1964 in the Fondation Maeght's courtyard, overlooking a pine forest on the Côte d'Azur.
