The ‘double life’ of Alberto Giacometti

Florence Waters | Christies.com | 20th October 2015

Giacometti focused on what he could observe. The Surrealists in 1920’s Paris tried but failed to win him over. Back home in Switzerland, his father pushed him to portray beauty, not Parisian avant-garde styles. Francis Bacon noticed that when he and Giacometti went to museums, his friend liked the “wrong” pictures. What he wanted to see was the “presence” of an object.  The result – some of the most intense art of the century.