Praeterita

After visiting the Giacometti museum in Paris , I read James Lord's biography of the great artist. Two things stayed with me after I finished it. First, was there ever an artist in the last century in Paris whose life was as closely woven into the fabric of one district than Giacometti and Montparnasse? Perhaps the writers Sartre and De Beauvoir, or Samuel Beckett. But Giacometti's life in Paris, almost from the start, was based in Montparnasse, and in particular a building on the Rue Hippolyte Maindron to which he moved in 1926 and stayed until his death in 1967. The second thing is his absolute dedication to his work. He had a reasonable degree of early success in the late twenties and early thirties with the sculpture he made while he was associated with the Surrealists. After he broke with them in about 1935, he found himself making clay models that were smaller and smaller, to the point where they would crumble into fragments. So the next day he would start again, wor...

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 arou...