Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, and printmaker born in Borgonovo, to a family of artists. He studied in Geneva and at the École des arts et métiers in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1922, where he trained under Antoine Bourdelle and became a key figure of the Surrealist movement in the early 1930s. His Surrealist sculptures — The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932), Spoon Woman (1926), Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932) — are among the most original works of that decade in any medium. He broke with Breton and the Surrealist group around 1935 to pursue a sustained engagement with the figure from life — an obsessive project of reduction and revision that occupied him for the rest of his career.

The sculptures he produced from the late 1940s onward — elongated, eroded figures whose surfaces bear the marks of constant reworking — are among the most distinctive works of postwar European art. Man Pointing (1947), City Square (1948), Walking Man I (1960) articulate isolation, spatial displacement, and the impossibility of resolution in formal terms that no other sculptor of the twentieth century has matched. He was also a painter — his portraits of his brother Diego and of the writer Jean Genet are major works in that medium — and maintained close friendships with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Beckett, who drew on him for the imagery of Waiting for Godot. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1962, receiving the Grand Prize for both sculpture and painting.

His work is held by MoMA, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.