Giacometti, Giovanni Alberto (1901–1966)

Alberto Giacometti was a titan of twentieth-century art. His rich oeuvre of sculpture, painting and drawing ranks alongside pioneering artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brâncuşi. Giacometti arrived in Paris in 1922 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, principally creating drawings in a cubist manner. By the mid-to-late 1920s, Giacometti’s sculpture was intimately associated with Surrealism. Giacometti’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s combine an exploration of forms with intimations of physical violence, onanistic sex and pain, and are an obvious reassessment of surrealist themes.