Letter from the Publisher

Welcome to all returning readers and new visitors! I am Rebecca Katherine Levenson, the Founder and Publisher of ArtRKL. This week's Letter from the Publisher examines the life and career of sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

 

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is best known for his impossibly thin, stretched-out sculptures, figures that look like the wind could swallow them. But Giacometti’s art was never about style alone. Behind the skeletal silhouettes lies a body of work deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry, existential doubt, and relentless observation. His works meditate on presence, distance, and the impossibility of truly knowing the human form, even when it stands right before you.

 

Alberto Giacometti pictured with his sculptures. Photographer unknown. Photograph via Pinterest.

 

Born in Switzerland into a family of artists, Giacometti began drawing and sculpting from a young age under his father's influence, the respected painter Giovanni Giacometti. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, he moved to Paris in 1922, immersing himself in the avant-garde circles of Montparnasse. He was briefly aligned with the Surrealists, producing strange and unsettling works like Suspended Ball (1930), which hinted at sexuality and violence through ambiguous forms. But by the mid-1930s, Giacometti distanced himself from Surrealism, turning back to the figure and the act of looking.

 

This shift marked the beginning of his lifelong obsession with the human body, not as a mass but as a perception. During World War II, he lived in Geneva and began creating minuscule sculptures, some only a few centimeters tall, which he claimed were the size the figure appeared to him from a distance. After the war, these tiny forms evolved into the tall, emaciated figures for which he became famous.

 

Alberto Giacometti photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 1961. © Henri Cartier-Bresson.

 

Giacometti’s postwar sculptures, such as Walking Man (1960) or Standing Woman (1958), study alienation and endurance. Their surfaces are rough, almost flayed, marked by constant reworking. It’s as if Giacometti was never quite finished with them, constantly adjusting, always scratching at some elusive truth. These attenuated forms seem present and ghostly, standing as fragile testaments to human survival in the aftermath of war. The artist once said: “The more I work, the more I see things differently… It’s like chasing a ghost.”

 

Much of Giacometti’s work was influenced by existential philosophy, particularly his friendships with thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre even wrote the catalogue essay for Giacometti’s 1948 exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, calling the figures “the moment of pure presence.” In a world destabilized by conflict, Giacometti’s gaunt men and women stood like nervous witnesses, trembling with the weight of being.

 

Giacometti working on the sculpture "La Grande Tête", Paris 1959. Photographer unknown. 

 

His paintings and drawings reflect the same existential tension. In portraits of his brother Diego or his wife Annette, Giacometti would labor obsessively over the placement of features, scratching and blurring until the faces nearly vanished. The background would often close in claustrophobically, reinforcing the idea that space itself was unstable, a kind of visual vertigo. Everything in Giacometti’s world, from a head to a chair, had to be fought for. To draw something was not to record it but to wrestle it into visibility.

 

Despite the melancholy tone of his work, Giacometti achieved widespread acclaim in his lifetime. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1956, won the Grand Prize for Sculpture in 1962, and was celebrated with major exhibitions worldwide. Yet he remained deeply skeptical of success. Fame, to him, only confirmed how far art could fall from truth.

 

Alberto Giacometti in his studio photographed by Ernst Scheidegger. Sourced from Pinterest via artnet.

 

Alberto Giacometti’s legacy lies in his refusal to accept easy answers and his belief that the act of seeing was a kind of failure. That art existed not to resolve this failure but to dwell in it. His spindly figures are not merely postwar symbols or aesthetic curiosities. They are emblems of what it means to search, doubt, and continue sculpting even when the material seems to vanish.

 

Thank you,

Rebecca Katherine Levenson