Alberto Giacometti
Did the Surrealist Group ever regret expelling Alberto Giacometti from their club His crime was a return to figurative sculpture and painting from a model, a direction that would ultimately make him one of the great artists of the 20th century. Born in Switzerland in 1901, his father was the post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti. One of four children, he began drawing and sculpting from an early age. In 1920, he began formal study in Geneva and traveled through Italy, where he became fascinated by the works of Giotto and Tintoretto. In 1922 he moved to Paris and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he studied with Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. From his base in Montparnasse, Giacometti began to show his work, which was influenced by Cubism as well as art from Africa and Oceania. In the early 1930s, he was invited to join the Surrealist Group and his work from this time including Slaughtered Woman 1932 and The Palace at 4 a.m. 1933 was highly influenced by surrealist ideology. However, Giacometti kept coming back to the model, searching for ways to create figures. After being expelled from the group, Giacometti began to create sculptures of the human form that were skeletal and elongated, sometimes alone, and sometimes in groups passing each other without acknowledgment. During World War II he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others who saw the genius of his art. A series of exhibitions Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1948, Kunsthalle in Basle in 1950 brought his painting and sculpture to a wider audience, culminating in the Venice Biennale of 1962, where he won the grand prize for sculpture. Alberto Giacometti died in 1966. His work can be seen at MoMA, The Tate and other world class museums.
