Fondation Giacometti

"Throughout many interviews given mainly from the 1950s onwards, Alberto Giacometti created for himself the mythical character of a man perpetually dissatisfied and prey to daily existential drama. When it proved impossible to come out of the creative impasse, the gesture of destroying the work, and by that gesture, making a clean sweep, became part of the whole character. Legend has it that Giacometti, haunted by dissatisfaction, destroyed his works as he was making them. Only a limited selection might have been taken from his hands at times.
If the testimonies from those closest confirm that the artist was continually questioning his practise, a careful examination of the archives shows however that he didn’t systematically destroy his works. In the accounts he gave his close relations and journalists, he especially referred to his post-war career, while the disappearance of his works was a more common phenomenon in the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s. Analysing those years also shows that the voluntary destruction was, in reality, rarely the only explanation for their loss. We are dealing with a varied and complex typology of ‘disappeared’ works and the hand of Giacometti was not always responsible, far from it in fact." 

Michèle Kieffer, Extract from the catalog of the exhibition 

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