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<\/p>\nIn 2028, the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti will open the Giacometti Museum and School in Paris\u2019s prestigious 7th arrondissement\u2014the first museum to be dedicated to the Swiss master. The foundation has long planned to open something bigger than the diminutive Institut Giacometti, which it inaugurated in Paris in 2018 as an interim showcase.<\/p>\n
The foundation\u2019s collection is exceptionally large, encompassing more than 10,000 items\u2014including, says its director Catherine Grenier, \u201cthousands of drawings, over 400 sculptures, 100 paintings, a whole collection of decorative objets d\u2019art, prints, everything that was in the studio, all the archives\u201d.<\/p>\n
Where the institute is just 350 sq. m, the new site, the former Invalides train station, offers 6,000 sq. m, half of which will be dedicated to showing the artist\u2019s oeuvre. Yet even there, Grenier says, the foundation is having to think about which works it will not be able to fit in. \u201cPeople don\u2019t know we have masterpieces from the earliest period, when Giacometti was very young, masterpieces from the Surrealist period, masterpieces from wartime, masterpieces from after the war, masterpieces from the late period.\u201d Most of the collection, she says, has never been exhibited.<\/p>\n
The Montparnasse studio the artist so famously inhabited for close to 40 years was a tiny, 23 sq. m rental, packed to the gills with works and belongings<\/p>\n
When Giacometti died intestate in a Swiss hospital in 1966, his wife Annette inherited his entire estate. She spent the decades until her death in 1993 refusing to sell anything that was not editioned and obsessively cataloguing and archiving the items in her keep. She contacted every collector she knew had works by him to request information and documentation. She wrote countless index cards. The Montparnasse studio the artist so famously inhabited for close to 40 years was a tiny, 23 sq. m rental, packed to the gills with works and belongings. Annette removed it all, from the paintings he had done on the studio walls to the ashtray still stuffed with cigarette butts.<\/p>\n
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Alberto Giacometti in his studio Denise Colomb 1954\/Archives Fondation Giacometti\/Succession Alberto Giacometti\/ADAGP Paris 2026<\/p>\n
Grenier highlights how unusual this is. First, while Giacometti did sell works and bequeathed several others, not least to the Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung\u2014which was created in Zurich in 1965 from the significant collection acquired by the Pittsburgh industrialist G. David Thompson\u2014he also kept a lot back. Heirs will typically inherit pieces from an artist\u2019s later years. Here, every era is covered.<\/p>\n
Second, inheritance struggles usually lead to the fragmentation of personal collections. The couple had no children, which made it easier in Giacometti\u2019s case to keep it intact. But beyond that, Annette was adamant the works be kept together, Grenier says. She had no liquid capital to buy a space or to set up a private foundation with an endowment, but she also had no doubt that ultimately it is what needed to happen: even bequeathing the collection to the state would not have guaranteed its integrity. In the end, the state itself formally set up the foundation in 2003. When Grenier joined in 2014, her first move was to find a showcase window\u2014the institute. The second was to start the search for a place and the funds for a proper museum.<\/p>\n
The move to the Invalides site is part of the city\u2019s major urban renewal project, R\u00e9inventer Paris, to rework dozens of uncommon heritage sites. Two property developers, the Emerige Group and Nexity, jointly won the competition to restore this 19th-century station, built initially for the 1900 World\u2019s Fair. It stands just metres from the Quai d\u2019Orsay and the Alexandre III bridge, which leads over the Seine to the Petit Palais and the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es beyond. As locations go, it could not be more central or fancier. This has led to some controversy.<\/p>\n
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Alberto Giacometti’s Buste de Diego (1955) Fondation Giacometti; \u00a9 Succession Alberto Giacometti \/ Adagp; Paris 2026<\/p>\n
A bit over the top?<\/p>\n