Sabine Weiss, Alberto Giacometti dessinant dans l'atelier, 1954, coll.Fondation Giacometti, Paris.
© Succession Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris et ADAGP, Paris)
© Sabine Weiss

17 Apr 2020

Alberto Giacometti : a whole life to draw

Live Lecture
by Mathilde Lecuyer-Maillé
#GiacomettiChezVous

The Fondation Giacometti's research team is offering a series of online lectures, a new format broadcast live.

Alberto Giacometti has had an obsessive relationship with drawing throughout his career. After his years of academic training in his father's studio in Stampa, Switzerland, and then with Bourdelle at the Grande Chaumière in Paris, Giacometti's graphic works gradually shifted towards the neo-cubist forms of the late 1920s, then during the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, his drawings, which were very pure, combined abstract signs, poetic language and stylized figurative motifs.
From 1935 Giacometti returned to figuration. The conference will also address the major themes of his post-war works and the diversification of his graphic techniques, in particular lithography, which disseminates his mature graphic style, made famous by Paris sans Fin. A selection of previously unpublished works will also provide an insight into his more confidential practice of ballpoint pen drawing. Marketed in France in 1950, the "Bic" enabled Giacometti to satisfy his compulsive need to draw whatever the medium: margins of books from the "Série Noire", newspapers, notebooks and paper tablecloths from the cafés of Montparnasse where he was used to drawing.


By Mathilde Lecuyer-Maillé, conservation officer
Lecture in French

To search for a work, consult the Alberto Giacometti Database