The world’s first museum dedicated to the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti has opened to the public. The private Art Nouveau and Art Deco mansion located in Paris’s 14th arrondissement is now a permanent home for the collection of the artist’s work ranging from 350 sculptures, 90 paintings and 5,000 drawings, lithographies and etchings. Archives, including his correspondence and photographs, are also on display.

Giacometti is best known for his elongated, withered representations of the human form, including his 1960 sculpture Walking Man which in 2010 broke the record at auction at $104.3 million. After experimenting with Cubism and Surrealism, Giacometti broke from Surrealism and began his radical revision of the representational tradition in sculpture. Giacometti’s severe figures explored the psyche and the charged space occupied by a single person. Linked to Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, they are seen as metaphors for the postwar experience of doubt and alienation.

The Montparnasse district (14th arrondissement) is where Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived and worked for forty years. The new institute presents a reconstruction of the artist’s studio. The intimacy of the place will be recreated through a system of glazing, lighting and bleachers allowing visitors to immerse themselves in what was the creative setting of the artist.

http://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/institute