Portrait of an Artist: Giacometti Quiz

Answer: Switzerland

Giacometti was born into a family of artists. His father, Giovanni, was a rather successful Post-Impressionist painter who had achieved a moderate amount of fame. Giovanni encouraged his four children, of whom Alberto was the eldest, to pursue careers in the arts and for the most part they excelled.

Answer: Giotto

Giacometti said of Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, "(They) gave me a crushing blow in the chest. I was suddenly aimless and lost, I felt deep pain and great sorrow." It was this euphoric emptiness that gnawed at Giacometti for the rest of his career, he never seemed to be able to fully achieve his objectives on any given project.

Answer: Bourdelle

Émile-Antoine Bourdelle had worked under Rodin, and passed his experience and knowledge on to Giacometti. However, by the end of his four years under Bourdelle, Alberto had decided to embark in a different direction and abandoned naturalistic sculpture...a new phase of his career would now begin.

Answer: Diego

Diego was a skilled artist himself, though he never achieved the fame and renown of his brother Alberto. Diego would very patiently model for Alberto much later when the latter took up the regular business of painting. In 1927, the brothers set up shop anew at the rue Hippolyte-Maindron, where they would work for the rest of their careers in Paris.

Answer: Surrealists

Giacometti became friends with several of the Surrealist artists, for example the sculptor André Masson, in the late 1920s. This led to a period of experimentation with Surrealist concepts in his work. Alberto was never quite comfortable with this new 'Surrealist' label, and began exploring anew in the early 1930s for different inspirations. Like Masson, who had left in 1929, Giacometti eventually departed from the Surrealist fold when he began working once again with models, a cardinal sin according to the authoritarian leader of the Surrealists, André Breton. Before his official 'excommunication' could begin (there was actually a mock tribunal!) he stepped away from the movement...never to return.

Answer: Geneva

Alberto returned to his native Switzerland, where he eventually met his future wife, Annette Arn (they married in 1949). During his period in Geneva from 1941 to 1945, he worked with his brother Bruno, a well-established architect.

Answer: Elongated, emaciated human figures

The elongated figures that Alberto began sculpting around 1947 were inspired by his viewing of 'primitive' sculpture in the Parisian Musée de l'Homme. Clearly his work drew inspiration from works of African and Austronesian sculpture.

Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre, the leading figure among the French Existentialists, became quite close with Giacometti. Indeed, Giacometti has been described by some art historians as the leading figure of the existentialist art movement, his emaciated figures being related to a sort of tragic existentialism. Alberto welcomed the friendship with Sartre (and Simone de Beauvoir) and was quite interested in the philosophic ideals of the Existentialist movement, but he wasn't ever quite comfortable with the attention he received as a result of this.

Answer: The statue vanishes

Giacometti commented on this phenomenon his entire life. It seems that as a boy, when he would paint, his subject would diminish in size upon the canvas. Similarly, in his sculpting career he would go through periods where his works would diminish in size until they could fit into a matchbox. His emaciated figures also reflect this 'shrinking feeling'.

Answer: True

In 1962 he received a prize at the Venice Biennale. Though he wished to avoid such accolades (Simone de Beauvoir, "Success, fame, money - Giacometti was indifferent to them all."), he realized late in his career the pleasure of a limited amount of recognition, which brought him some joy regarding his accomplishments.

The joy would not last long though, he died in 1966 in his native land of Switzerland. We are left only with the legacy of his wonderful vision. Thank you for trying this quiz, I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to see more, I have created a number of similar quizzes on various other artists...I invite you to try them.