Alberto Giacometti will be the subject of a new museum in Paris, the first ever dedicated to the Swiss sculptor’s work. The Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti have announced that the museum will be called Musée & École Giacometti and, as previously reported, will be located in Paris’s 7th arrondissement in the former Gare des Invalides train station. It will now open in the second half of 2028, instead of the original 2026 targeted opening.
The Musée & École Giacometti will offer the world’s largest collection of his work. The foundation’s current home at the Institut Giacometti in Paris’s quiet 14th arrondissement, which opened in 2018, has limited exhibition capacity, as the institute is just 350 square meters (3,767 square feet). The new space, along the Seine and next to the Pont Alexandre III, is far more central and will offer 6,000 square meters (64,583 square feet), half of which will be dedicated to exhibition space. The other half will be given over to a bookstore, restaurant, cafe, and educational space offering non-degree art classes.
The foundation’s collection is some 10,000 items strong, with “thousands of drawings, over 400 sculptures, 100 paintings, a whole collection of decorative objets d’art, prints, everything that was in the studio, all the archives,” its director, Catherine Grenier, said in an interview with The Art Newspaper. She explained that most of the collection has never been exhibited: “People don’t 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.”
The museum will include a permanent installation of several hundred works by Giacometti, various galleries and exhibition halls showcasing works by other modern and contemporary artists, and a reconstruction of the atelier where he lived and worked in the 14th arrondissement from 1926 until his death in 1966, which will be transported from the Institute where it is currently on view.
