Alberto Giacometti: The Boy from the Mountains (Part 1)

Why do many regard the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti as the greatest sculptor of the 20th century? And why did he spectacularly fall out with the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton? Join Alastair and James as they explore the austere and often bizarre world of Alberto Giacometti. 'Alberto Giacometti. Faces and Landscapes of Home', Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, 13 December 2025 – 28 March 2026 If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I, 1960 Alberto Giacometti, Spoon Woman, 1927 Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930-31 Alberto Giacometti, The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932 Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut (Femme égorgée), 1932 For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Laura Sovilla Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  A gaunt, emaciated, solitary male figure, around six foot tall and with limbs almost as spindly as pipe cleaners, strides with grim determination, as if doggedly pursuing some unknown mission. He's got these triangular wedge-like feet, like two great hunks of cheese, and seems mired in the thick, lumpy-looking ground beneath him, as if he's squelching about in mud. And yet, he keeps on going, walking, loping, pacing, with that strange air of purpose. Where is this wraith heading? And why is his form so withered? That's a description of the most famous sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti,

• 0:53Speaker 00

  known as Long Qui Marche, or The Walking Man, which dates from 1960. And I think of it as a sort of, well, a 20th-century everyman, struggling on in this blasted, godless universe. That's how I see him. How about you, James?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, I definitely can't unsee the blocks of cheese, Alastair, now you've mentioned them. But you're right, it is a defining work by arguably the defining sculptor of the 20th century. And it's a work that absolutely seems to express a society that has been through war and through genocide and seen the death of God, and that suddenly, in some ways, feels naked and alone. And you know, there's nothing else quite like this, really. I think, you know, just like Francis Bacon, just like Jackson Pollock, mature Giacometti is completely sui generis, it's completely unique, and it's obviously very commercially successful as well.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I mean, that is, in a sense, the big surprise to me. I remember years ago, working at the paper, as you know, I'm an art critic at The Telegraph, and there was a sale of, I think it was a cast of The Walking Man, can't remember when, maybe around 2010, something like that, and it went for, at the time, a record price, tens of millions of pounds for a sculpture anywhere in the world. And I had to write a piece about it instantly. And I was sort of looking at it and thinking, obviously, very familiar work, know all about it, but isn't it quite surprising that this appeals? I mean, I get it, billionaires might want a really colourful, voluptuous, sexy Picasso, but these are so seemingly melancholic and downbeat. And, I mean, you describe this post-war, mature period of Giacometti's

• 2:35Speaker 00

  work, from which The Walking Man dates, to which it belongs. And these are these elongated, people will instantly know them, these elongated, impossibly elongated sculptures, these figures. And they all look like wraiths or ghosts, this sort of progeny of the undeads, this very anxious world, as you say. They feel like they express something of total human misery, but also some determination as well.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yet, I mean, 10 years ago, I wrote this down, actually, 10 years ago, The Pointing Man, another one of his pieces, sold for $141 million.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I mean, it's staggering.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  It's staggering, becoming the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction. And yet, the fascinating thing about Giacometti, Alastair, is although he was very famous in his lifetime, and despite these astronomical prices that his work is fetching, he lived the life of a quite poor man. And you know, you know probably better than anyone else, the art world is filled with people obsessed with money and status, but Giacometti, for all of his failings, and he did have some failings, we'll probably discuss them.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Well, he was very open about them.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  He was very open.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  In fact, that was part of his shtick, that was his USB, the great, sort of, you know, Beckett-like failure, but yes.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  But he was someone who was never really interested in money, was never really motivated by fame or status. He was motivated solely by making his work and by trying to give form to the visions and the objects and the people he saw around him. That's quite inspiring, I think.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I find it totally inspiring and really, really fascinating, because we've already touched on, there's the work, and the post-war work for which he's best known, and which sells for mega bucks these days. But there's also the mythology of Giacometti that emerged during his lifetime. And, I mean, we'll come on to this, but he basically spends all of his life in this particular studio in Paris, which was a total hovel. But it becomes part of his myth, so that photographers are coming there, and you see him working, covered in plaster dust. And all of these intellectuals were coming. So even though it might seem that his life is quite narrow in some sense, I think it's enormously broad, because you have this extraordinary cast of characters that he's liaising with. In a sense, there

• 4:49Speaker 00

  are the sort of strange characters that he's creating, but there are also all of these intellectuals that he's friends with, people like Jean-Paul Sartre, or the playwright Samuel Beckett. He has, we'll come on to this, I hope, a little dalliance later in his life with the movie star Marlena Dietrich.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  He's pals with a lot of sex workers. So there's a lot of fascinating biographical material, which is part of, I think it's informed partly how we think of, quote-unquote, "the modern artist."

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Well, shall we get started?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  We absolutely must, James. I'm looking forward to this enormously. So this is the story of the life and work of Alberto Giacometti.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Alastair, can you tell us something about Giacometti's childhood?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I find the childhood very interesting indeed. He's so associated with the so-called School of Paris, modernism, and he spends much of his life in Paris, of course. But he's actually Swiss. So he comes from a mountain village, a mountain valley, in, I think, south-east Switzerland, it's close to the Italian border. He's born in 1901 in this village called Borghonovo, and quite soon, the family moves to a nearby village of Stamper in 1904. And the family is really important to him throughout his life. He has a father, who is an artist, called Giovanni.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  A good artist, actually.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  A good artist, a good artist who's working in that post-impressionist style, kind of post-Paul Cezanne. And to begin with, Alberto doesn't know whether he wants to be a painter or a sculptor, and he produces some really very decent paintings, emulating that post-impressionist style that he's learnt from his dad. And there's also his mother, Annetta. And if you see photographs from later on in their lives together, because they remain really, really close, they always had this special bond, the family resemblance between mother and son is just utterly extraordinary. Annetta was someone who had a deep Calvinist faith, and the linchpin of the Giacometti family. She has four children, Alberto is the eldest.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Quite soon, there comes a younger brother, Diego, who's a very important figure, we'll come on to him in Alberto's life, Diego later joins him in Paris. There's a sister, who dies sadly in childbirth, and there's a younger son called Bruno. But my sense of his childhood is that it was really idyllic.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  He speaks about it later, he calls it this sort of paradise. There's a sense that he's hanging out, playing with the local kids, spending a lot of time outdoors in nature. I think there's some story, isn't there, have you come across this, where they find this big golden-yellow monolith high above the village, and there's a cave in it, and they spend all their time there?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, lots of artists, lots of great artists emerge from quite difficult childhoods. That's not the childhood that Giacometti has. He's living, as you say, in paradise, it's like the Sound of Music, this great Alpine Valley. His family, they're not super rich, but they're affluent enough. They're a very happy family as well, apparently there's never an argument heard in the whole household. And, as you say, Giovanni, his father, is an artist, and it seems like the parents do encourage all of their children to take up creative professions, and they all actually end up being creative people later on in life. So it seems to me like a pretty good childhood. And yet, there's something melancholic about Giacometti from the start, isn't there?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  I think there is. And if you have ever been to this valley, you will know that it is very steep-walled. The mountains on either side are very big. So yes, Sound of Music, summer idyll, but come winter, it's gloom.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Oh, there's no light.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  It's icebound.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  There's no sunlight strikes the village for three or four months in the winter.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Which sounds...

• 8:42Speaker 01

  So they're living in darkness, essentially.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you have to remember, this is the beginning of the 20th century, there are no mod cons, there's no electricity, there's no running water. And there's this rather wonderful quote, because you'd think living in darkness would sound quite depressing. But Annetta, the mother, says quite early on to Alberto, "Unfortunately, you like the shadow." And I think that is completely, whether true or not, symptomatic of, as you say, there is something within Alberto's psychological makeup.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  That is drawn somehow to darkness, to dark issues and preoccupations, even within this wonderful paradise. Because, you know, you have to remember, the Giacometti family, just to finish painting that picture of the paradise, quite early on, Annetta inherits from her uncle this summer house in a place called Maloya, which is just up the top of the valley, bordering with another valley, but it's about roughly 1,000 metres higher up. And the family spend all of their summers there. And... Really interestingly, you can see in the way that Alberto depicts his family homes, they look really comfortable and extremely well appointed, cosy.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  And he obviously loves, he returns to them.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Love cabin vibes, aren't they?

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I'd love to be able to live in a place like that, be wonderful.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  But it's funny, you talk about the darkness and the light, there's this photograph, famous photograph of the family from taken in about 1911, so Giacometti was nine or 10 years old. They're sitting in this pasture and the boys are wrapped up like Christmas presents. They've got these enormous ludicrous ribbons.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  On their necks. But Giacometti looks really depressed and that darkness, that state of mind, that melancholy state of mind stays with him for the rest of his life. I mean, his cousin says that he only ever saw Giacometti laugh once.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  In his entire life. And another friend of his, and I'm going to read this quote because I think it's really important. Another friend later said of Giacometti, he said this, "He was haunted, as if someone were chasing him, like a wanderer in exile, cursed. His anxiety level was terrible. It was more than fear, it was terror. His only moments of peace seemed to be at his studio, where there would be a lull, as if the wind stopped."

• 10:55Speaker 00

  I think that's, I hadn't come across that quote. I think that's fascinating for a number of reasons. One is it just foregrounds the fact that he did have this anxious temperament, which I think was the case. And the reason I find that interesting when we're thinking about him in the context of that early family setup is he has this really close relationship with Diego, this younger brother who's born about a year afterwards, later joins him in Paris. And Diego sounds like a very different character, quite a wayward youth, good-looking, younger girlfriends, light stylish clothes, and you get the sense that they helped each other. Alberto provides Diego ultimately with a purpose and a livelihood. But Diego's clearly providing Alberto with some sense of security, maybe helping him deal with some of that anxiety.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  And the other thing in the quote that you've just read out, which I think is fascinating, is that idea that Alberto is finding in art and in the studio, a sense of solace and refuge perhaps. Because really early on, he did picks up drawing, you know, around about age 10. And he's very, very good at drawing and he knows it. I mean, he's quite arrogant about that. I mean, some of the things he later says about it at the time. But he was also, whenever he could, he'd finish school and he'd run back home and he'd head for his dad's studio. And he said, "There was no greater joy for me than to run, to run to the studio as soon as school was out and sit in my corner." And I find that so fascinating because later, we get to Paris, we'll get there in a second.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  But eventually he does end up in this, as we've described already, this kind of hole, this hovel on the Rue Épopole Mèndron, which would be his studio forever. And it's like a really ramshackle version of that early studio. There's something in his psychological template where he's finding security in that sort of environment, don't you think?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's carry on the story. So he grows up in this great village. He then goes to a private school, a boarding school for a few years, an evangelical boarding school where his talent is recognised, not just academically. Because Giacometti, although we often think of him when we see him covered in muck in this hovel-like studio, we think of him as almost like Van Gogh or some kind of savant. Neither of those artists were that. And clearly the school recognises that he's got artistic talent. But they give him a little room, don't they, above the gymnasium, which can double up as a studio? And he makes all these pictures of his friends.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Well, it obviously becomes his thing that he can do and is really praised for. So there's a later quote, we're looking back on his early life, and he is saying, "I was terribly conceited about his capacity for art. I admired myself, felt I could do everything with this wonderful weapon, drawing." Isn't that an interesting way of thinking about drawing as a weapon? That I could draw no matter what and that I saw more clearly than anyone. So he's clearly skilled and he has the example of his dad. And it's quite interesting as well to think of, here they are in Switzerland, it's not really seen as this great centre of modernism. And he is hanging out when he's at home with this kind of great outdoors bucolic kind of world and the local kids. But there's always with him this artistic double life. So early on, he's clearly feeding on what his dad is telling him.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  His father had studied in Munich and Paris. He's bringing avant-garde ideas into the family home. There are art magazines flooding in. And very early on, Giacometti is looking through art books, art magazines, and copying works of art that he loves. Quite soon after the secondary school thing, there's this crucial moment when they go to Italy. And he's there with his dad, isn't he? And I think this, again, feels like a self-conscious art education for father and son. So they travel to Venice.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Like a gap year. Similar age. I mean, he's what, 18, 19 years old? He's left school. He's actually had a brief and very unsuccessful stint at art school, where his teacher calls him untalented. He only spends six months, returns home. And then he goes on this trip to Italy. It must have been this extraordinary awakening. If you realise, think of it, he's grown up in this very remote village where there's barely even daylight, let alone a whole load of masterpieces to look at. It must have been very eye-opening for him.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  I think, I mean, he spoke about it throughout his life and I think it really was. I mean, he's looking at paintings by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto in Venice. Goes to Padua, he's obsessed with the Giotto frescoes. He's in Florence. Well, who isn't? I mean, we need to do an episode about Giotto. Florence, he's looking at ancient art. He's visiting the archaeological museum. He's looking at ancient Egyptian art, which would be such an important sort of benchmark, a template for him later in his life, both in his art and later when he comes to creating and designing decorative art objects in the 30s, which is one of his sidelines, which we may come on to. But there's also, around this time, there's a great sort of period of still trauma.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  So there's this incident which, well, I mean, I think you wanted to talk about this.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Can I tell this story?

• 15:46Speaker 00

  I think you should.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, you know, this is called the Stories of Art podcast. You have to tell the best stories. And this is one of the most of many great stories in Giacometti's life. This is one of the most bonkers stories. So it's, and I think it's also another legacy of Italy because it's now, I think, 1921. And he's back in Italy for a second time, this time without his father. He's on a train to Pompeii. And next to him, in the train compartment, there's this elderly man, a Dutch tourist called Peter van Meurs.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  And they strike up a conversation in the train.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  So they're strangers, they don't know each other?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  They have no connection to each other at all. They just happen to be sitting next to each other in the train. They strike up this conversation. And when they arrive at Pompeii, Giacometti says, "Well, good talking to you." He leaves. Van Meurs carries on to Naples. Giacometti thinks nothing more of it. But Giacometti makes such an enormous impression on Peter van Meurs that when Van Meurs gets home, he then puts adverts into all the Italian newspapers saying, "If you are the Swiss-Italian art student who was..."

• 16:53Speaker 00

  The Wunderkind.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, who was on a train to Pompeii in the spring of 1921, please get in touch. Now, the likelihood that these adverts are going to reach Giacometti in this little mountain village are almost, you know, negligible. But as it happens, his cousin sees the advert. He says, "That's Alberto." And he passes on the advert to Giacometti. And Giacometti thinks, "Well, it's slightly weird, but I do remember him." So he writes to him. And it turns out that Peter van Meurs is going to make another trip to Italy and wants a travelling companion, all expenses paid.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Giacometti's family suspicious, I think understandably suspicious of why this elderly guy wants to bring this young man with him on this trip. But Giacometti is desperate to go back to Italy because of, as you described, the extraordinary influence and inspiration that Italy was for him. So he goes on this trip and in early September, he crosses the border from Switzerland into Italy. He meets up with Van Meurs. And on the 3rd of September, so the next day, they travel up into the mountains and Van Meurs starts to fall ill. They get to a hotel, Giacometti calls a doctor. The doctor gives Van Meurs some medicine, but it doesn't work. And the next day, Van Meurs gets more and more sick. And Giacometti is sitting by his bedside, reading him novels.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  And that evening, as the afternoon turns to the evening, Van Meurs dies. He dies in front, Giacometti watches him from the bedside. He watches the life disappear from his body.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  So he's really studying and fascinated by the process of death as it's unfolding before his eyes. I mean, I'm, what does this reveal about him?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think the first thing I should say to finish the story is the police actually think there is, it's suspicious. And they actually interrogate Giacometti, thinking, "Well, why are these young guys there with this wealthy Dutch guy? And then suddenly the Dutch guy dies?" He's obviously released without charge. But it has a very, very powerful impact on him. And I think the best way to describe it is with Giacometti's own words. Because this is what Giacometti says about that incident. He says, "For me, it was an abominable trap. In a few hours, Van Meurs had become an object, nothing. Then death became possible at every moment for me, for everyone. It was like a warning. So much had come about by chance.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  The meeting, the train, the advertisement, as if everything had prepared to make me witness this wretched end. My whole life certainly shifted in one stroke on that day. Everything became fragile for me. And since then, I have never been able to sleep without a lamp, nor go to bed without the thought crossing my mind that I might never wake up."

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  I think the reason I tell this story, Alistair, is it's obviously a great story. I think it's very important for his state of mind. I do think it's also very important for understanding his work. Because I do think it goes back to what you discussed at the start of this podcast. So much of Giacometti's work, especially the mature work, is hanging on this...

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Knife edge between existence and non-existence, between the human being, a living, existing being, and just being a kind of dead carapace of a body.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And I think this is part of it. Watching someone move from life to death, watching a person become an object, is really at the core of what his art is about, I would say.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  You know what, it's making me think of a few things. I mean, it's such a compelling tale. One is that Giacometti's modus operandi is he kind of almost invites crises and looks for epiphanic moments, these kind of revelations.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  We might have some later on in this episode.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  There are a few, and this is clearly a very early one. Can I give you, it's a much shorter story, but before we get, we're about to get to the move when he goes to Paris. But I think in terms of these crises, there's another kind of key, interesting early moment, which is also revealing about Giacometti.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  So many crises aren't there, and Giacometti's life.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Perma-crisis, I think, is the Giacometti sort of thing. But this one is, he's in Rome and he's fallen in love with his cousin.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  I don't know this crisis. Oh, right.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  So he's spending a bit of time, I can't remember, I think it must be around 1920, 21, something like that. And he is with his family and by now, he's already done some sculptures. His very first sculpture is he models a head of his brother, Diego, using plasticine sourced from him by his dad. And he's still oscillating between painting and sculpture. And he's there with this family in Rome, and there's his cousin Bianca. And he says to her, look, I want to make a bust of you. And so she sits for him for an entire winter. So six months, he says. And at the end of it, he says to himself, as he later puts it, that it was a sort of

• 21:55Speaker 00

  total impossibility of capturing the entirety of a head. So after all of that work, all of that time, he just throws it in the dustbin when he leaves.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  That's classic Giacometti.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  It's totally classic Giacometti. I mean, it's sort of like almost inviting failure, sort of relishing the failure as part of the artistic struggle. Also having this very complicated, seemingly psychologically quite fraught relationship with a woman. So there are a number of kind of key muses who are inspiring the work. And then somehow, they're not always consummated relationships. I'm not suggesting anything like that happened with the cousin, but I think in both of these instances that we're describing early on, you're seeing a sort of template for how he behaves and how he works throughout his life.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, throughout his life, what you see, he's a profoundly inefficient worker, isn't he? You know, he takes an enormously long time to do things. He's constantly destroying what he's made. You know, that's just, that's just how he was from start through to finish.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  So Giacometti is now 20 years old, and it's at this point, he makes the decision to move to the city that is the undisputed cultural capital of Europe, Paris. And we will find out how he gets on after the break.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. We're telling the story of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. And at barely 20 years old, he decides to move to Paris. And what a time to be there.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, it's as exciting as it gets, isn't it? Paris in the 1920s. Paris in the 1920s, it must, it must be the artistic centre of, certainly of Europe. It's really the artistic centre of the world in the 1920s. And 1922 is of course, the great year of modernism.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  It's the year of, you know, the wasteland, it's the year of Ulysses.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Of course. Published in France, right?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, published in France. It's the, and, and, you know, he arrives in a Paris where basically all the great artistic figures.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  The one I love that sort of encapsulates it is there's that famous line by the American writer Gertrude Stein, an art collector. So Paris, she says, Paris was where the 20th century was.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  So, you know, there's a real sense of, it's the epicentre.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  It isn't really until after the Second World War, isn't it? It's the centre.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  And maybe it kind of regains a little bit after the Second World War before the momentum moves to America. But the thing that I find really interesting about Giacometti is it'd be very easy to tell a simple story where, so he's in the provinces in Switzerland, or as it were, and then he moves to the centre of modernism and he's in Paris. But what does he do when he gets to Paris? He actually goes to a really traditional, he seeks out a very traditional art education. So he attends these classes with a man called Antoine Bordel, who's a sculptor.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  He's a student of Rodin, I think, actually.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  He had been a pupil of Rodin, I think possibly even had sort of worked with Rodin.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  And amazingly, he's there from 22 until 1927, having this really quite traditional setup of, you know, life drawing classes and sculpture classes, some in the morning, some in the afternoon. This guy Bordel is not really around that much. He's an excellent teacher, but he's there once a week. And Giacometti finds it frustrating. He later sort of says, he dismisses this period, but art historians have established, he was there for much longer than you might think, as well as visiting the Louvre and looking at Sichadic art and ancient art and ancient Egyptian art, as well as going to the Musée de l'Homme, where he's looking at the, you know, what was known as sort of tribal art collections that would have a big impact.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  But Bordel has this influence on him. So I, just reading for this episode, I'd forgotten this detail, but I kind of love it. There's a sculpture by Bordel, which is called Madeleine Charnaud, and it's a very tall, thin.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Ah, woman.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  And it dates from 1917. And much later in his life, when Alberto Giacometti is making sculptures of tall, thin women, you're like, ah, maybe that's the traditional art education did have some impact on him after all.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  That's interesting. But at the same time, he's also beginning to experiment with modernism, isn't he?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  He is. Well, there comes a break because I think 1925, so he's been in Paris for a few years, and he suddenly realises that things are not going well. He cannot capture appearance and reality as he sees it. And he, he says to himself, I need to, quote, abandon the real. And this is the moment that Diego, partly to reassure their mother that Alberto could keep an eye on him, he pitches up in Paris and then comes to live with his, with his brother. And there's this sort of moment, this great sort of ampass. And from then on, Giacometti, who is totally aware of and immersed in all of that exciting avant-garde culture, and increasingly so from this moment.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  He starts to work from memory, from imagination. He's looking at lots of sort of non-quote unquote traditional Western sources, if you like. He's spending time at the Musée l'Homme, where what was known as tribal art was fascinating him. And there is one work in particular that's sort of key in this regard. It's a sculpture known as Spoon Woman. And if you look at it, it's this quite simple sort of geometric forms. Her bottom half looks like this big swelling sort of bulbous element. There's a sort of blocky bit, which has her torso above and a small rectilinear head. But that bulbous element is in fact based on a ceremonial spoon that we know was from the Ivory Coast of West Africa.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  So it's a brilliant example of Giacometti looking at these other sources of inspiration at this moment in his career. It's the beginning, if you like, of this great shift. But if we're slightly collapsing and moving things forward, which I think we probably should, because there's lots to cover, this is also the moment, we haven't talked about them yet, where the thing that is really dominant in Paris is surrealism.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yes. Shall I do a little explainer of surrealism?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Please do.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Well, so Giacometti begins to become associated with surrealism at the very end of the 1920s. By this stage, surrealism is a pretty young movement. It had been formed by a very charismatic, almost tyrannical French poet called André Breton.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Difficult man.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Very difficult man. And it was a literary and artistic movement. That's the main goal essentially was to harness the creative power of the unconscious mind. So it draws heavily on dreams, on sexual fantasies.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  The irrational.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Of the irrational, on free association, on the theories of Sigmund Freud. And it had started out in 1924, it was a pretty fringe movement, but over the second half of the 1920s, it had become a juggernaut. I mean, it was the kind of elephant in the room in Paris. Every major progressive artist and writer by circa 1930 was engaging with it in one way or another. So it's no surprise that Giacometti would be drawn like a moth to the flame of surrealism.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  And, and he really is drawn right into that inner circle of surrealism. So what you have from 27 through to the early mid 30s, you have this amazingly fertile, productive period of explosive creativity where Giacometti isn't making any of those sculptures that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  They're not even on the horizon, these sort of, you know, tall elongated gaunt figures. Instead, he is creating, I think utterly startling and compelling array of surrealist sculptures influenced by all of those ideas. He's so much part of the inner circle that Andre Breton, who owns a very famous piece, surrealist piece by Giacometti called Suspended Ball.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that one.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  We should, we should describe in a sec, but he becomes, he actually is Breton's best man. Giacometti is the best man, like weirdly bourgeois.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't know that. I'm not sure if I'd want Giacometti to do my best man speech. But anyway, that Suspended Ball is a great, great work. It's a, it's a, it's a cage. There's a ball hanging from a string. The, the ball is resting on a kind of crescent shaped piece of wood and it has this suggestive, very sexually suggestive movement, doesn't it? It's a great work. There's another one I love from that period. It's called The Palace at 4am. Have you seen that one? It's like a stick house.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  It's like a sort of stage set. It's quite architectural in the feel.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And there's a sort of ghost floating in the top. There's a woman down below. They're one.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  A spine, a backbone.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  There's a, of course, there's a backbone. Yeah. That's so.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  It's just kind of like, it's, it's a vision of a dream, isn't it?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  But if, if you also sort of think about how the kinds of sculptures, he starts off with that Plastique and bust of Diego, he's learning sculpture under, in that traditional setting in Paris in the early 1920s. He suddenly moves totally away from that. So he's creating work which sometimes is placed on the floor. Sometimes it's quite open, quite linear. It's very, very suggestive, full of innuendo. I mean, there is an art historian, I couldn't resist including this description of Suspended Ball, James, I thought you, you would enjoy, as it's been called, not only a sadistic image of a slashed eye or a stroked testicle, it's also an anal sadistic machine.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Oh, is that your writing, Alistair, or?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  That one is not me. That's not me. That's not from one of my articles, although, I mean, amazing if it had been. But I, I, I'm still slightly getting my head around how that works, thinking about this particular piece. But can we, I know we're gonna, we wanna talk about one of these works in particular.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, go ahead. What do you wanna talk about?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Well, can I, can I just say, just to save it, because it's such a kind of like great piece. And what we haven't done is established that during this period, we haven't really spoken about the studio.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, exactly. I was going to ask you about the studio.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  So he moves, he has a couple of studios initially in Paris, but in, I think, 1927, so before he comes on to the surrealist works really, he moves into this famous studio that you mentioned briefly at the very start of the podcast. Can you walk us through this, as you describe it, hovel?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  It, this hovel. I mean, I think we can, because as I said, there are so many photographs of Giacometti in this space that we can create quite a good picture of it, even though the building in which it existed was razed and demolished subsequently and, and no longer exists. So we're on the left bank, we're in this area at this district of Paris called Montparnasse, which at the time was full of artisans workshops. Giacometti, as you say, he'd already had studios in Paris. There was one that was overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery, but he was looking for another space. And he ends up almost on a whim, signing a lease to rent this place on a street called the Rue Hippolyte Mairdron, which is named

• 33:03Speaker 00

  after a 19th century sculptor, minor, minor figure. And around the time, you've just got, there's a timber yard there, there's some quite humble dwellings, there's a few cafes, and there's apparently a grim looking primary school, which is right next to this studio building. And you'd go through a door and there'd be a small internal passageway. And initially, the space that he moves into is really quite tiny. And you'd go in, it has this north facing window which allows some light in. And there's a rickety staircase. There's this balcony where Diego, who joins him in Paris, he ends up, I think he sleeps up.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  He sleeps on the balcony, doesn't he?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  He's up on the balcony. Alberto's underneath. And famously, this place becomes just, it's a proper working space with these two young men, two young bachelors going about their lives. And there's no running water. If they want to clean, they have to go and use a pump in that passageway outside. It really is quite.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  There's no electricity, there's no heat, there's no, the toilets aren't, they don't, it doesn't have a toilet. I mean, it's a real, yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  It's a total slum. It's a hovel. And, and, and Giacometti likes it that way. Famously, it's, you know, it's covered in all this plaster dust. The dust covers all of the windows. Later on, people are there and, you know, eventually he does actually marry, will come on to his, his wife down the line. But, you know, people saying to him, look, you might wanna just kind of, it's a bit streaky, you can't see very much, there's not much light coming through. He's like, no, no, no, no, keep the dust. So it's this, this sort of monochromatic world it becomes of just grayness, gray being a color that he loves. And again, it's almost like this sort of perverse, he relishes it.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even when later on in life, when he becomes quite wealthy, he absolutely has the means to move out. He could take any studio he wanted in Paris. He never leaves it, does he? He works in that squalor for the rest of his life.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  There, there's the famous line that he has, which is the best thing about being rich is you no longer need to care if you've got holes in your socks. And to me, the kind of implication of that is that he wouldn't actually buy new socks. He doesn't, he knows he can, but he kind of likes having the holes in his socks. At the same time, just a slightly, because this studio, this space, which would have been visited by so many key, important intellectuals, artists of the period, this tiny little place, the place where he's creating the sculptures, which you would never have known at the time, but in a few decades would be selling for those extraordinary sums that you mentioned earlier in the, in the conversation. This is such a key kind of environment. But let's just slightly complicate the picture.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Because as well as embracing the chaos, Giacometti is quite an unusual, peculiar figure in terms of his psychology. And he actually has his own sort of order. So you mentioned before, he doesn't go to sleep unless there's this lamp on. He doesn't supposedly go to sleep unless his shoes are lined up in a particular way.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. He has this from childhood, actually. He has to arrange his shoes and his socks in a very specific way by the bed before he goes to bed.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  I think it's similar, say he's eating out, because of course he can't eat in the studio where he's living. So every meal he kind of pops out, even if it's just for a glass of wine, a cigarette, you know, maybe a coffee in one of the local cafes. He spends a lot of time, when he's sitting there, arranging all the elements, the glass, the ashtray, the packet of cigarettes, he comes to love American cigarettes. And I think that there is this sense within him of he knows exactly what he needs in order, perhaps to assuage those internal anxious feelings, but also to try and get him in that creative spirit that it has to be just so in order to create art. And you have to remember that he hasn't

• 36:41Speaker 00

  left Switzerland behind. Throughout this period, throughout his life, he's travelling home to those lovely, comfortable, cosy interiors, looked after by his mother, spending time in Stamper, spending time each summer up in the, in the place in Malloya, where he's also making work. And fascinatingly, in this period where he's got the studio, where he's becoming the surrealist sculptor, he's leading this artistic double life.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Where he is creating this stuff that feels, as you say, full of primal, violent urges in the surrealist work in Paris, when he's tapped into the avant garde. But back in Switzerland, he's doing.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Going home to cuddle his mum.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  He's going home to cuddle his mum, creating these quite naturalistic, sweet pictures of his family members. And, I mean, I, I quite like this. I said recently, I just happened to be writing a story for a magazine about a show of Giacometti, which was looking at his sort of Swiss world, which was taking place at Hauser and Worth in Saint-Maurice. And I spoke to the curator, an art historian, to be a Betzola. And his way of putting it was that his mum, Annetta, never actually saw, I don't know whether this is totally true, but never really saw Giacometti's surrealist work. He didn't talk about it, those things. There's certain things, this is what Betzola said, there's certain things you don't tell your mother as a boy. And that is bang on, particularly with the work that, I mean, I'm

• 38:03Speaker 00

  hoping we can talk about, which is Woman with Her Throat Cut, which is a masterpiece, but a difficult masterpiece, a really problematic, possibly misogynistic, I mean, to, you know, let's discuss, masterpiece of the surrealist years from 1932.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  What are we looking at?

• 38:22Speaker 00

  We're looking at something which is, I find it astonishing. It's a sculpture, but it's a sculpture which is on the floor. There's no plinth, there's no base, there's no pedestal. And it seems like it's a quite linear writhing form of a figure with splayed legs, an arched, thin back leading up to a bosom, and then this elongated, stretched-out windpipe which has been slashed. The right leg of this figure is bending back underneath the belly and the breasts

• 39:02Speaker 00

  to create this open, very menacing, spiky-looking rib cage which curves up. So it feels as if, you might not know that this was a sculpture at all. You could look at this and think, it's a mantrap. If you trod on this, it would just suddenly, those teeth would close around your feet. It's a really gruesome, macabre, unsettling work.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember when I first saw this piece in New York some years ago. I can't remember if it was the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art. I saw the title, Woman with Her Throat Count, and I just couldn't understand what it was. It looked like a stick insect or something to me.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And actually, James, I'm sorry to jump in, but on the insect point, because it does totally look insect-like. The surrealists were fascinated by the praying mantis, which devours its male partner. So they're supposedly, particularly in captivity, are post-copulation. So we've got Giacometti with all of his slightly fraught sexual neuroses, that surrealist interest in violence and the sort of dark side of sexuality. Because this woman looks like she could be, okay, she's probably just been murdered, or is she also in the throes of sexual ecstasy? There's the French term for the orgasm, the petit mort. But sorry, I got over-excited. I interrupted you there.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, one of us has to be over-excited, because I've got to tell you the truth. I hate this piece.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Oh my, brilliant, right.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  I hate it. I think it is this fetishization of sexual assault, of rape, of violence, of murder. I think, as you say, it is laced through misogyny. I mean, you know, and I think the very fact the surrealists took it into their heart is proof of how misogynistic surrealism could be at this time. And I just don't understand why Giacometti would make something like this. I mean, he did have a misogynistic strain to him. He did have a very complicated relationship with women, as we've alluded to, for various complicated reasons. But overall, he was a decent guy. He was a gentle, humane individual.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And I just do not understand why he would make something so prurient, so sinister.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  I think it would be silly to deny that a lot of what you've said is clearly there, present in the sculpture. So, and it's possible that one of the sources for this piece may have been a short story written by one of Giacometti's friends, all about the serial killer, Jack the Ripper.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  But formally, as in the way it looks, the way it operates as a piece of, as a work of art, as a piece of sculpture, the fact it's just, it's there on the floor. It's this malignant thing. I find it such an excitingly imaginative and original creation.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  It is unforgettable.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And I also think that what Giacometti is tapping into is not necessarily a sort of hatred of women, but perhaps articulating his own fears. And as I say, sexual neuroses. He's very open about the fact that he suffers sexual impotence. He suffers erectile dysfunction. He seems to have a real problem having sexual relationships if he's emotionally invested in a woman. I mean, he obviously has lots of relationships, but quite often, he quite likes just the simple transactional nature of visiting a sex worker, and he does that a lot in Paris. And I think that there are sort of elements to the piece which maybe are,

• 42:29Speaker 00

  first of all, just acknowledging that there are darker, lustier, violent, primal impulses which are in us all. We may not like it, but he's brave enough to express that and articulate it in this piece. And there's also, is it totally misogynistic? I mean, the woman is a victim, but maybe there's even not a sort of relish of her victimhood, but a real sense of pathos and possible sympathy. If you look closely at the sculpture, and this again is like, formalistically, it's such a sort of amazing added aspect. She has one of her arms, ends in this odd, pod-like, phallic, kind of sausage-like shape,

• 43:13Speaker 00

  which is linked to the arm so that it can be moved. It can kind of swivel around. And Giacometti supposedly, for him, Giacometti said that this hand was about, maybe the inability of a victim to really fight back in that moment. It's somehow trying to convey that sense of helplessness. So you've got this sort of split mode of looking at it from the point of view, perhaps of the victim as well as the male onlooker. That said, James, there is, he writes this later memoir, and in true peculiar, oddball fashion, he does write about this odd ritual that at some stage in his life, he had to go through in order to get to sleep. Have you come across this one?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  It's not just about the lamp, but it basically involved, he had this, he called it a recurrent demand. And he had to kind of play through mentally this fantasy that he had, right? Quite involved and odd, where he would mentally, he'd come to this forgotten grey castle, and he had to always kill two men.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I have.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, one who was sort of seventeen and pale and very frightened. The other always had to be in a suit of armour. And then, and then this is a quote, it kind of comes out of nowhere. "I raped two women. Once I'd ripped off their clothes, one who was thirty-two years old and dressed in black with a face like alabaster, then her daughter, who wore loosely floating white veils. The whole forest echoed with their cries and groans. And then," he carries on for a bit, "he says, 'I burnt down the castle and fell contentedly asleep.'" So I'm not denying by any means that there's something really quite profoundly odd about the sculpture, but I just think that rather than necessarily brushing the weirdness of those deeper depths of human psychology and sexuality under the carpet,

• 45:02Speaker 00

  it's interesting to actually be confronted by them.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and it's pure surrealism, isn't it? You mentioned the dream, there are the sexual desires, there are the sort of biomorphic forms. And this is why the surrealists just love it. And why very quickly this relatively unknown, strange figure from Switzerland becomes this central figure for a short period of time in the surrealist movement. And he exhibits quite widely, quite frequently with the surrealists in the early 1930s. But his connection to the surrealists doesn't last, does it?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  No, it doesn't.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Why do you think it breaks apart?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Well, there are a number of reasons. One is that his dad, Giovanni, who we mentioned before, he dies in 1933, and Alberto is totally distraught. And it's quite interesting. You can kind of correlate Alberto's movement away from surrealism. It happens kind of from around this moment. And it's almost as though, remember how I was saying, whenever he's going back to Switzerland, he's working in that more, quote-unquote, sort of figurative, traditional, working-from-a-model way? It's sort of, that's his dad's mode.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  He's still perhaps on some unconscious level emulating his father's way of making art. I think another reason is that, I mean, you mentioned Breton before. Breton was, I think, what was the word he used, tyrannical?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  He could be tyrannical, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  He sounds like, like really a very difficult, in many ways quite objectionable, just really controlling man. Constantly there are all these ideas of people would be in, and then they're out of surrealism. You'd suddenly be excommunicated. And I think something similar happens with Giacometti, where there's, you know, there's this big moment where they start falling out in a restaurant, and then the group, including Breton, they move back to a friend's apartment. There's this huge showdown. And in the moment, I mean, I rather love this, Giacometti's suddenly just, he's so hacked off with it all, he dismisses his entire surrealist achievement up to that point. He says, "Everything I've done till now has been no more than masturbation." I mean, there's no way back for that.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  There is no way back. Actually, you know, I just want to go back very briefly to the father thing, because I think the father is important. There's a story, I don't know if you remember this story from his childhood, when Giacometti's father is away on some art trip, and Giacometti bursts into tears. And his brother goes to comfort him, as Diego so often did. And he said, "What's the problem?" And Giacometti says, "I can't remember what my father looks like." And so I wonder whether it's the absence of the father, the death of the father, who was such a hero to Giacometti, that makes him think, you know what? I'm going to have to start returning to more traditional figurative work, returning to the model. And he starts making these figurative works. Breton, as you say, hates it. And it all comes to a head, I think it's Valentine's Day.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  In 1935, they're in this café in Montparnasse. And Breton is absolutely furious with Giacometti, furious that he has turned his back on surrealism. You know, and when Giacometti mentions the masturbation line. Breton just absolutely implodes, explodes, because for him, this is a criticism of the whole surrealist project, essentially.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  And actually, maybe quite a valid one.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and quite a valid one. And indeed, what happens after that is, as Breton says at the table, and now Giacometti, poor young guy, surrounded by Breton and his cronies. And Breton says, well, look, we're going to have to sort this out, one way or the other. And then there's this moment, Giacometti responds, he says, don't worry, I'm leaving. Boom, mic drop, leaves the café, and that is the end of his connection to surrealism. And I've got to say, Alistair, I think that is a really very brave thing to do. We talk about Breton as a tyrant. He was a tyrant because he was immensely important. He could make or break, the surrealists could make or break an artist's career at this point. So Giacometti's decision in 1935, when he's only, what, 33 years old, he's just beginning

• 48:58Speaker 01

  to establish himself, to walk away and to go his own way is deeply risky as a strategy.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  In many ways, I think it's like, at the time, it is quite a poor career move.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  It's a poor career.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  He becomes quite isolated from the avant-garde. He's shunned for a period. He sort of decides, I want to go back and start sculpting or depicting heads. Breton's saying, well, everyone knows what a head is. Like, what's the point?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  And Giacometti says, well, I don't know what a head looks like.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, exactly. He has real problems with that.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  But it's career suicide. It's career suicide. And in fact, he doesn't end up having another exhibition for about 15 years. So it is a seriously risky move.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Well, I think the late 30s for Giacometti are in many ways quite difficult. He has this alternative career as an interior designer, and he creates these decorative art objects, which he's very good at. He works with the great interior designer Jean-Michel Frank. And I think he creates more than 100 objects for him, but he sort of realises, he gets to the point where he's thinking, the decorative art objects I'm making and the sculptures, there's no difference between them. And he feels like he's lost touch with what's special about art, the sculpture having a sense of mystery. And you get this sort of succession of crises in the late 30s, where he's left behind, he's left surrealism, he's shunned by the avant-garde, he is trying to work again from the model, but that's proving difficult.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  He's had that sort of crisis where he's lost touch with the mystery of art, he's trying to rekindle that.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  He's run over by a car.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  He's run over by a car. I mean, the guy ends up, he has this limp, you know, like, things are not really going well for him. And the incredible thing is that we haven't even got to the Second World War, he still hasn't made any of those sculptures for which today he's most famous.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  I know, it's extraordinary. And then the war comes along, and the Germans are approaching Paris. And he finally makes a decision to leave Paris. This is in June 1940. The first thing he does, you know what he does? He buries his sculptures in the ground near his studio to keep them safe. And then on the 13th of June 1940, he and his brother, they get on bikes and they ride out of Paris south to escape Paris. It's a kind of crazy story, because they're riding, the Luftwaffe are above them, bombs are being dropped, machine guns are being fired, they're cycling through smoke, there are body parts everywhere, and they cycle for several days.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  And then, I've never quite fully understood why, they turn back and return to Paris. But as it happens, they get back to Paris on the day that the French surrender. And so Paris becomes safe. And so at that point, I think Giacometti spends a few months in Paris and decides, again, to go and visit his mum, because he's constantly going back to visit his mum and his parents in Switzerland. But when he gets to Switzerland, he realises he doesn't have the paperwork to get back into Paris. So he spends the duration of the war, the rest of the war, three and a half years, in this tiny little Swiss hotel room, where he's making these small pieces.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  And in a sense, it's a sort of low point for him. He hasn't created the sculptures for which he would become world famous. I'm not even sure there are a glimmer in his imagination yet. And there's this sense he can take stock, but he's away from Paris. Can he actually turn things around?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  I think he can.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  And to find out what happens next, you'll have to wait for the next episode, because that's all from us for now. Goodbye.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.