Part of Alberto Giacometti art-historical importance springs from his defence of figuration at a time when the advantage was with abstract art. He was born in October 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background - his father, Giovanni, was a well known Post-Impressionist painter. From the beginning, he was interested in art:

“Once in my father's studio, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was drawing some pears which were on a table - at the usual still-life distance. But they kept getting smaller and smaller. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said: 'Now start doing them as they are, as you see them.’ And he corrected them to life-size. I tried to do them like that, but I couldn't help rubbing out; so I rubbed them out, and half an hour later my pears were exactly as small to the millimetre as the first ones.”

Giacometti art characteristics:

-elongated bodies

-heavy grounded feet

-small skeleton- like-heads

-have dark feel/ embody emotions surrounding death

Giacometti went to the School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva, where he studied with a member of Archipenko's circle.

In May 1920 he went to Venice for the Biennale, where his father was an exhibitor, and on the way back he visited Padua, where he discovered Giotto in the Arena Chapel:

'The frescoes of Giotto gave me a crushing blow in the chest. I was suddenly aimless and lost, I felt deep pain and great sorrow.'

Giotto

The Presentation of the Virgin c. 1305FrescoCappella dell'Arena, Padua

He made two more visits to Italy in quick succession. During the second one, an old Dutchman whom he had agreed to accompany, and whom he in fact scarcely knew, was suddenly taken ill and died. His death made a great impression on the young Giacometti.

In 1927 he had his first one-man exhibition, at a gallery in Zurich, and in the same year the Alberto and his brother moved to the cramped studios in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron which they were to use for the rest of Alberto's life.

His first one-man show took place in 1932, and set a fashion for Surrealist objects with symbolic or erotic overtones. Much of Giacometti's art at this time was influenced by primitive sculpture seen at the Musée de l'Homme - an influence which was to persist even after he changed direction as an artist.

An important development in Giacometti's work took place during the war years. In the period 1935-40 he had worked from the model, and had also made some paintings; he then began to make heads and standing figures from memory, but had an experience which paralleled his attempt in his late teens to draw the still life of pears in his father's studio:

To my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller. Only when small were they like, and all the same these dimensions revolted me, and tirelessly I began again, only to end up, a few months later, at the same point.

In the 1960s Giacometti's health began to fail. In 1963 he underwent an operation for cancer of the stomach (he made the curiously characteristic remark: 'The strange thing is - as a sickness I always wanted to have this one.'). The cancer did not recur, but in 1965 heart disease and chronic bronchitis were diagnosed. Giacometti died in June 1966 at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland.