The Foundation
The Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung has the world’s leading museum collection of works by the Swiss sculptor, painter and graphic artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). The Foundation’s holdings cover the full range of the artist’s career from his earliest works to the very last he completed.
The Foundation was established in 1965 in Zurich by a group of art-lovers that included Hans C. Bechtler who – with the help of the Basel-based gallery owner Ernst Beyeler – had acquired the Giacometti collection of Pittsburgh industrialist G. David Thompson. Thompson’s collection included numerous important sculptures dating from the avant-garde period as well as examples of most of Giacometti’s major works.
In the Foundation’s first year, Giacometti himself contributed a group of drawings and several late paintings, and in 2006 Bruno and Odette Giacometti presented the Foundation with 75 plasters and several bronzes from the artist’s estate, including some significant late pieces.
Most of the Foundation’s collection is kept in the Kunsthaus Zürich, where representative selections are exhibited on an ongoing basis. A quarter of the original collection is housed in the Kunstmuseum Basel, another tenth, in the Kunst Museum Winterthur.