Alberto Giacometti - Portrait of Jean Genet

The human figure has always been at the center of artistic research. Since the classical age, the naturalistic rendering of human anatomy has been a primary objective of painters and sculptors throughout the ages, spanning all eras and stylistic trends. Indeed, in addition to the naturalistic interpretations of the Renaissance and various classicisms, which aimed for a truthful and detailed representation of the body, the human figure has also been a central theme in the new aesthetic concepts brought about by the historical avant-garde movements, such as Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Consequently, in the artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century, in the representation of the human subject, greater emphasis has been placed on the interior (psychological) rather than the exterior (anatomical) aspect. All of this is central to the research of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, who has placed the human figure as the primary subject of his artistic research. His depiction of humanity is consistently influenced by contemporary existentialist philosophical currents, such as those of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This dramatic existentialism finds its most coherent visual expression in the art of Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

The existential tensions that shape the human figure are discernible not only in Alberto Giacometti's sculptural production, but also in his painting and, consequently, graphic art. While in his sculptures the artist developed a wholly expressionist aesthetic, with slender, elongated figures harking back to an archaic influence, in his two-dimensional works Giacometti still remains somewhat tied to the sensory element in his description of the subject. But this is the starting point for explaining his psychological and philosophical distortions. In particular, the thin, calligraphic line is the primary medium Giacometti uses to bring his existential tensions to life. As in the famous portraits of his brother Diego, he employs a vibrant graphic sign to construct the subject and the environment in which he interacts. His line becomes more incisive in the description of faces, where he achieves an extremely agitated, frenzied gesturality. In this lithograph, based on a 1957 drawing depicting the French writer Jean Genet, Giacometti unites subject and setting almost as one. The same quivering graphic line identifies the existential tensions in the human figure and in the few pieces of furniture that delimit the room's space. Yet it is obvious that these tensions are concentrated on the portrayed subject, whose seated figure appears almost unraveled at the center of the composition. Giacometti's more agitated gestures thus create a vibrant entity of existentialism, with particular attention, however, to the subject's plastic qualities. The dialectic between the seated figure and the setting recalls several works by Francis Bacon, but while in the Irish painter the deformations take on a more carnal quality, Giacometti remains faithful to his intense Expressionist calligraphy.

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in Borgonovo in the Bregaglia Valley, in Italian-speaking Switzerland. He trained in Paris, exhibiting his first works inspired by Brancusi and the primitivism of African, Egyptian, Mexican, and Cycladic art. After an initial Surrealist phase, Giacometti embarked on a long period of solitary and tormented sculptural exploration, which concluded in 1945, after the war, with the creation of his first slender, elongated figures, the stylistic hallmark of his mature work. They were exhibited for the first time in 1948, accompanied by a catalog featuring Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "The Search for the Absolute," which establishes Giacometti's work as the most authentic artistic expression of existentialism. During these years, he became a unique artist on the international scene, thanks to his sculptures, exhibited at the 1956 Venice Biennale, and his obsessive, increasingly tormented pictorial portraits of his brother Diego, his wife Annette, and Caroline, the prostitute who became his model and lover. His fame was already immense when the Alberto Giacometti Foundation was founded in Switzerland in 1964. Alberto Giacometti died of a heart attack in 1966.

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