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This program presents a biography plus images of Giacometti's greatest works. The son of a painter, Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland. At 18, he left school to find himself and soon announced that he would devote his life to art. At 21, Giacometti went to Paris to study with sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who had been a student of August Rodin. Though he is often identified as an Existentialist, Giacometti was initially involved with the Surrealist movement, from which he was formally expelled in the 1930s. In the mid-1940s, he began a new phase of sculpting in which his statues became stretched out, their limbs elongated. When these unique and startling statues where exhibited in New York in 1948, they immediately became icons of 20th-century art. His reduction of the human for to its essential elements heralded Minimalism, one of the 20th century's most fruitful movements.