Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) 

Artist of the École de Paris. After studying art in his native Switzerland and then in Italy, Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922 where he began working in a Cubist and primitivizing manner. In the early 1930s he became involved with the Surrealist group, producing disturbing sculptures and uncanny objects, typified by the uneasy eroticism of Suspended Ball (1930–1; Zurich, Giacometti Foundation). From 1935 he began to return to realism, incessantly drawing from life. By the time he returned from Switzerland, where he had sheltered from the war, he had evolved a style which finely articulates some of the phenomenological thought of the emerging existentialist movement in Paris; he quickly became involved with the period's central figures, associating with Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett among others. In paintings, drawings, and sculptures, his attenuated figures seem oppressed by a thick palpable space. The Artist's Mother in her Room (1951; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou) shows his overriding concern with the problems of the representation of objects and distance. 

Text source : The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Hugh Brigstocke