Ways of being

Exhibitions 2: L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti: Collection de la Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti

In terms of body shape, the week of the Rugby World Cup final was an odd choice for the Pompidou Centre to kick off a new exhibition of Alberto Giacometti, an artist whose attenuated vision of humanity seems better suited to Paris Fashion Week. In fact, those looking to apportion blame for size 0 models might well start with his spindly figures with platform-soled feet.

In post-war Paris, Giacometti was himself something of a style icon. With his austerely sensuous face, rumpled tweed suits and ever-burning cigarette, he embodied existentialist cool. The camera loved him. Famous photographers — Brassaï, Penn, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, Karsh — beat a path to his door, and pictures of the artist in his Paris studio were splashed across magazines under tabloid headlines like ‘The Torment of Alberto Giacometti: although museums vie for his sculptures…he considers all his work a failure.’

A successful failure! The media lapped it up: a whole room near the entrance to this exhibition is filled with photographs and news clippings. But the show’s principal star is not the artist, but his studio: the coldwater cubicle with makeshift mezzanine in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron that he kept from 1926 to 1966, the year of his death, whose contents were left in 1993 by his widow Annette to the foundation responsible for this display.

Born in Switzerland in 1901, the son of the post-impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, Alberto broke off his schooling in 1919 to follow his father into a career in art. He studied under Bourdelle in Paris, passed through a primitivist phase in the late Twenties and flirted with Surrealism in the early Thirties. By the mid-Thirties, following his father’s death, he had returned to painting from the model, but the figure snuck back into his sculpture in miniature.