«STAMPA. / 1916», Skizzenbuch

This large sketchbook dates from Giacometti’s days at the school in Schiers, which he attended from summer 1915 to spring 1919. In it he captures his classmates reading and writing, in the canteen and dormitory, taking part in evening debates of the students’ association ‘Amicitia’, sometimes with loose sketches, sometimes elaborated into meticulous compositions.

Studies of genre figures – haymakers, cobblers – and landscapes, together with copies from Old Masters, reveal him as an aspiring art student; Giacometti took Velázquez’s ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ as the basis of a bookplate for a colleague, developing it in a professional manner through a series of carefully considered intermediate stages that are both mischievous and quirky: caricatured scenes with colleagues and professors, executions and tortures ‘in all their olden-day glory’.

Material
Pencil; pen in blue ink: 2v, 5v–8v, 10v, 15v, 16r, 18v, 19r, 22v; Pen in green ink: 9r, 10r, 11v; pen in ink: 16v.
Dimensions
16.7 x 24.4 cm
Creditline
Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Donated by Bruno and Odette Giacometti, 2000
Object number
GS 217
Signature
not inscribed
Further information
19 sheets; belongs with GS 218.01-05
Provenance
  • Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft | Kunsthaus Zürich (Museum), ab 2000, Leihgabe
  • Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung (Sammlung), 2000, Geschenk
  • Bruno und Odette Giacometti, bis 2000
  • Alberto Giacometti