Figure

Alberto Giacometti came from a Swiss family of artists – his father Giovanni was a painter and his brother Diego was a furniture designer and sculptor. Though trained in painting and sculpture, Alberto abandoned painting early in his career (in the late 1920s) to focus exclusively on sculpture. He would return to painting only twenty years later following the Second World War, when he was back in Paris. These mature paintings – comprising portraits, nudes, and still-lifes – follow the stark linearity and geometry of his drawings, distinguished only by the presence of soft areas of impasto and washes, mimicking the smudges and shadows of a drawing. The paintings are often dominated by monochromatic schemes, although strokes of bright colors were introduced in some of the later portraits.