October 10, 1901

Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901 to January 11, 1966) was a leading Swiss artist, the son of  avant garde painter Giovanni Giacometti. His god-father also was a fauvist painter. By 1922 Giacometti had settled in Paris.  Below is how Encyclopedia Britannica recalls the artist's progress:

Breaking definitely with the Surrealist group in 1935, he began to work after nature again; what had started as mere studies became a lifelong adventure: the phenomenological approach to reality—that is, the search for the given reality in what one sees when one is looking at a person....

Around 1940 Giacometti arrived at matchstick-sized sculptures: figures and heads seen frontally as ungraspable appearances of reality far away in space....

At this point [1958] the phenomenological approach was superseded; he felt that reality was no longer dependent on being perceived by someone; reality simply was. Like the characters of Beckett’s novels and plays his figures represented a worldview in which space and time have their origin in the core of each being...Of course he spent the war years in his native country, returning to Paris after the war ended. His good friend, Jean-Paul Sartre encouraged the popularity of Giacometti's art with a 1948 essay: "La recherche de l'absolu." In 1963 Giacometti designed the stage set for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
 This illustrates Giacometti's ties with his generation, and allows us to appreciate this analysis of the artist's ethos:  "Alberto Giacometti created art that summed up Existentialism's interests in perception, alienation, and anxiety."

Fast forward to spring, 2009 and the results of a Sotheby's auction (written up by Carol Vogel in I think the New York Times)

The other big-ticket item — and another casualty of the evening — was “The Cat,” a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Made in 1951 and cast in 1959 in an edition of eight, it was expected to bring $16 million to $24 million, but ..... nobody wanted to take the cat home. As with the Picasso, the auction house had tried unsuccessfully to sell the sculpture privately for a higher price than the estimate earlier this year.

Then we read another write-up less than a year later:

One of Alberto Giacometti’s best-loved bronzes, “Walking Man I,” has broken the world record price for a work of art at auction, selling to an unidentified telephone bidder for $92.5 million, or $104.3 million with fees, at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday night.

It is nice to read that Giacometti was rich by the post war era, but continued to work in his shabby Montparnasse studio.

Below is another reason to remember this artist. And if I could be allowed a bit of whimsy, I would say Giacometti is pictured here saying to his cat, no, I don't care what you think about Sartre.