Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) is best known for his iconic sculptures of elongated and gaunt figures. He moved to Paris in the 1920s where he met artists and intellectuals such as Pablo Picasso, Balthus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and drew inspiration from primitive art and psychoanalytic theory. His work from this period is often associated with the Surrealist movement. After the end of World War II he rediscovered a wish to explore the figure. He drew, painted and sculpted elongated and emaciated male and female nudes, which became linked with existentialism and the human experience of modernity. He considered drawing the most important phase of his creative practice, one which allowed him to explore the objects and people around him and to locate his emotional response to the subjects.