Esquisse de tete de D sur socle, 1946-1947

Alberto Giacometti was a widely acclaimed Swiss sculptor whose work remains highly influential today, with his sculpture L'Homme qui marche I selling for over $104 million in 2010, and then another one of his sculptures L'Homme au doight selling for over $141 million in 2015, making his sculpture the most expensive in the world more than half a century after his death.
Both of these cast-bronze sculptures, with their unnaturally elongated and slender forms which became a signature of his sculpting work as a result of his determination to rework his sculptures until they were incredibly thin and small, are perfect examples of his contribution to the surrealist and cubist art movements which he first started experimenting with in Paris in 1922. In 1962, he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, however his artistic talent was not limited to just sculpting but was also expressed through many other mediums, including lithography; indeed, his final work before his death was a series of 150 lithographs entitled Paris sans fin, notable for their monochromatism.