The Late Work
1959–1966
Giacometti takes part in a competition to design a monument for the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York. He works directly in plaster, creating seven figures: four standing women, two men walking and a large male head. While none of these works is submitted to the competition jury, all of them are cast in bronze in 1960.
Giacometti’s work with Yanaihara causes him to perceive sculpture as a mirror of reality. The model’s gaze becomes the focal point of the artist’s study, and he concentrates on portraits of those closest to him: his wife Annette, his brother Diego and his lover Caroline.
He receives great international recognition during the last years of his life. The Venice Biennale invites him to exhibit in the Central Pavilion and awards him the Grand Prix for Sculpture in 1962. In preparing for the installation, he brushes oil paints onto some of his bronzes. In the same year, 1962, the Kunsthaus Zürich also stages a major Giacometti retrospective.
In Paris, he again meets Eli Lotar, a Romanian photographer who had been much in demand during the Surrealist period. Lotar sits as a model for three of his sculptures, the last one being the artist’s final piece before his death.
Major retrospectives are held all over the world in 1965 and Giacometti decides to visit them all. He travels to the Tate Gallery in London, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1965 the University of Berne awards him a hononary doctorate. Feeling increasingly weary and ill, Giacometti leaves Paris on 5 December and checks into the Cantonal Hospital in Chur. It is there that he dies of heart failure on 11 January 1966.