Giacometti, Alberto (1901-1966)

Swiss sculptor and painter. In the 1940s, he developed a highly original style, creating thin, rough-textured single figures in bronze. These emaciated figures have often been seen as an expression of the acute sense of alienation of people in the modern world. Man Pointing (1947) is one of many examples in the Tate Gallery, London.

His first works show the strong influence of surrealism, as in The Palace at 4 am 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a fantastic cage reminiscent of a stage set. During his surrealist phase in the 1930s he briefly experimented with kinetic sculpture (see kinetic art. After 1945 he worked mainly on his attenuated single figures and busts, works which express the way in which an object is transformed by perception. This obsession with the ever-changing nature of perception is also evident in his drawings and paintings, in which haunting, disembodied images emerge from a dense network of fine, tentative marks.

He was born in Stampa, near the Italian border, the son of the painter Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933). He studied sculpture in Geneva, Switzerland, and then in Paris, France, where he was introduced to cubism and surrealism. He also had links with the literature of existentialism (a philosophy based on the situation of the free-willed individual inhabiting a meaningless universe). His art was the subject of a celebrated essay by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he designed the set for Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in 1963.