I've just returned from Paris, France, where I was teaching for the sixth year in a row. Each time I go, I make sure to do at least one thing that I haven't done before. On this most recent trip, that new thing was visiting the Giacometti Institute, which opened to the public only a few months go and which is the newest art museum in Paris.
The institute is dedicated to the life and work of the great Italian-Franco sculptor Alberto Giacometti. It occupies three buildings on the Rue Victor Schoelcher in the 14th arrondissement, on a street overlooking the eastern side of the Cimitiere de Montparnasse. It comprises a library and academic archive centre, a restaurant, and a small exhibition space located on two floors of the building at number 5bis. The centrepiece of the museum is a reconstruction of part of the studio space that Giacometti used for nearly forty years, which was in a ramshackle building south of the cemetery near the Rue d'Alesia. Visitors can walk around a glass case, inside which you see a bed in the corner with the artist's mac lying on top, walls and furniture covered with the spidery, linear sketches characteristic of Giacometti's painting technique, work table covered with maquettes, tools, pairs of spectacles, cigarette packets, all the bric a brac of an artist's daily life, all reconstructed and placed to make it look as if G. had just stepped outside and could come back at any minute.
There's even a stool with an ashtray on top, containing the stubs of cigarettes.
The 8 euro admission fee is worth it just for this exhibit alone. But as you walk up to the main floor, you see small rooms exhibiting work from all phases of Giacometti's career: early drawings and sketchbooks, the odd sculptural constructions of his Surrealist phase in the 1930s, and the magnificent spindle-thin figures of the post-war years.
And the interior of the building itself is a marvel to behold. It was owned by furniture designer and collector Paul Follot, and the walls and furnishings are full of Art Nouveau and Art Deco touches.
On the main floor, you can stand in the former drawing room and gaze out on the cemetery of Montparnasse, with the light from outside entering the room and being partially refracted by tiny panes of stained glass, while standing next to a display case containing a sculpture by Giacometti. If you love art, and Paris, and beautiful buildings, there is currently no finer place in the City of Lights to experience all three of these things.
(Side note: From 1913 to 1916, Pablo Picasso rented one of the buildings next to this one, during a time in his life when Cubism was coming to its peak. I've written extensively about that in this older blog post.)
And the interior of the building itself is a marvel to behold. It was owned by furniture designer and collector Paul Follot, and the walls and furnishings are full of Art Nouveau and Art Deco touches.
(Side note: From 1913 to 1916, Pablo Picasso rented one of the buildings next to this one, during a time in his life when Cubism was coming to its peak. I've written extensively about that in this older blog post.)