KMW | Beim Stadthaus E‪N‬ Kunstmuseum Winterthur

Alberto Giacometti was in Geneva during the Second World War. In 1945 he returned to Paris. His old studio was still intact and he could have simply continued working.

Secluded, Giorgio Morandi lived and worked in Bologna. He specialized in still lifes on small format canvases.

The Alsace artist, Hans Arp, had already played a central role as artist and poet in the Dadaist movements in Zürich and Paris. Humour and irony also characterised his later work, especially the reliefs.

In 1926 Alexander Calder left America and went to Paris where the most important new artists of the time were working. His encounter with the Dutchman Piet Mondrian was groundbreaking.

The Italian Giorgio de Chirico painted his mysterious pictures in Paris before the First World War. He called his art “Pittura metafisica,” a style that had great influence on European painting.

The presence of Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque was exceptionally strong even before the First World War. The Spaniard Juan Gris discovered the foundations of his work within them, but nevertheless developed his own, quite individual style, which led him to a strictly classical pictorial design.