Tall Figure

After first producing work associated with Surrealism, Alberto Giacometti began making his distinctive elongated, skeletal bronze sculptures in Paris in the late 1940s. His works struck a powerful chord with the Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw the isolated figures as a visualization of his own ideas about the loneliness and ultimate absurdity of the human condition at the end of World War II. For his part, Giacometti insisted that he was simply attempting to convey his own experience of looking at people, though his method of working was sympathetic to Sartre’s response. The artist often reworked his sculptures over long periods of time, building up a clay model and then stripping it down, until he gradually eroded the figure’s body to its essential, fragile core.