Planar Showdown: Giacometti vs. Jacques Villon
Alberto Giacometti grew up in Switzerland in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley, a few kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933) was an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and artists. He shared his thoughts with his son on art and the nature of art.
Alberto Giacometti produced his first oil painting Still Life with Apples, circa 1915 and first sculpted bust Diego, circa 1914-1915 in his father's studioat the age of fourteen. His father and his godfather, the Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet(1868-1961) were two crucial figures in young Alberto’s artistic development. In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study, enrolling in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he attended classes given by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Drawings of nudes attest both to this apprenticeship and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, to the influence of Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Léger. [source]
many of the source images are from: http://thefuturelab.org/2011/02/01/716/
Jacques Villon
Jacques Villon was born Gaston Duchamp on July 31, 1875, in Damville, Normandy. His family is one of remarkable artistic repute; he and his three siblings Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Suzanne Duchamp would all make important contributions to 20th-century art. While still a lycée student in Rouen, he began his artistic training under his grandfather, Emile Frédéric Nicolle, a shipbroker and artist. Nicolle taught Villon engraving and printmaking, and in 1891 he was the subject of one of Villon’s earliest prints. In January 1894 Villon moved in with his brother Raymond in Paris’s Montmartre neighborhood and began to study law at the University of Paris. He soon lost interest in legal studies and instead spent his time submitting drawings to various magazines and newspapers, some of which were politically oriented. Partly in order to distance his family's name from these publications, he changed his name to Jacques Villon (an homage to French medieval poet François Villon). In 1895 he began study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and frequented the Atelier Cormon. [source]
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