Alberto Giacometti

Biography

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter and draughtsman, and one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Born in Borgonovo in the Val Bregaglia, the son of the painter Giovanni Giacometti, he moved to Paris in 1922 to study under Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In the early 1930s he became a leading sculptor of the Surrealist group around André Breton, from which he was expelled in 1935 when he returned to working from the model. After spending the Second World War in Geneva, he returned to Paris and developed the elongated, roughly worked standing, walking and seated figures and heads for which he is best known, often modelled on his brother Diego and his wife Annette. He received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1962 Venice Biennale.