Alberto Giacometti

Swiss (1901 - 1966)
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Alberto Giacometti Femme égorgée [Woman with her Throat Cut] 1932 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Annette et Alberto Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2018.

Biography

Born 1901
Died 1966
Nationality Swiss

Swiss-born sculptor Giacometti studied art in Geneva, moving to Paris in 1922 where he experimented with Cubism and became interested in primitive sculpture. He worked with the surrealist group until the mid-1930s, producing strange objects suggestive of cruelty, sex and dreams. After that time, he broke away dramatically from the Surrealists and returned to working from life. He then produced his best known works, a series of elongated and fragile skeletal figures, made not by carving but by an obsessive process of modelling in clay and whittling away.

Artworks

Objet désagréable à jeter [Disagreeable Object to be Thrown away] 1931
Atelier aux deux seaux [Studio with Two Buckets] 1955
Femme égorgée [Woman with her Throat Cut] About 1932
Femme égorgée [Woman with her Throat Cut] 1932

Glossary terms

Figurative art

  • A term for art that refers to the representation of the human figure, however, altered or distorted. It is often applied to paintings and sculptures made after twentieth-century abstraction that re-introduced elements of the human body into abstract styles, including work by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.