Fractals in Art and Architecture

Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947)

Giacometti studied art in Zurich, Paris (where he studied the decorative floral style of William Morris), and Florence.

Of particular interest are his paintings motivated by fileds of Alpine flowers pushing through the snow.

Giacometti abandoned traditional representationalism, applying thick blobs of paint to the canvas, producing paintings that consist of only a distribution of large and small patches of color.

These and a series of similar pastels, some painted over a decade before Kandinsky's first abstract works, are the basis of some art historians' claim that Giacometti was the first abstract painter.

In addition, Giacometti painted the entrance hall ceiling of the Zurich Stadtpllizei. Though stylized, these images exhibit a distribution of smaller and smaller scale details.

Giacometti certianly had discovered - and expressed - the view that natural scenes are made of ever more copies of ever smaller details. Without using htis language, he recognized scaling relations and hierarchies in nature.