Giacometti, Alberto

Giacometti, Alberto (1901-1966), Swiss sculptor and painter, born in Stampa. After a period of study in Geneva and Rome, Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922. He established himself as one of the leading Surrealist sculptors of the 1930s with work that showed a great deal of wit and imagination. Perhaps the most outstanding of his Surrealist pieces is The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932-1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York), an architectonic skeleton holding suspended figures and objects that expresses the subjectivity and the fragility of the human sense of time and space. In 1948 Giacometti exhibited his works after a 12-year lapse, during which he experimented in sculpture and painting. From his experiments Giacometti evolved a distinctive style of highly expressive, attenuated figures. Infused with a pervasive melancholy, both his paintings and sculptures convey a sense of tenuous existence, as though the figures were constantly threatened with obliteration by the surrounding space. In such paintings as The Artist's Mother (1950, Museum of Modern Art), the seated figure seems about to disappear in the web of lines and strokes that delineates the sitting room and its faintly ominous furnishings.

Giacometti's Grande Femme Debout I (1960) sold for a record US$14.3 million in 2000.