A retrospective of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti at the Yuz Museum through the end of July is part of a global tribute to one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the death of Giacometti (1901-66), and commemorative exhibitions are being mounted in the top art museums, including the Tate in London and the Picasso Museum of Art in Paris.

The Yuz exhibition is the only tribute being staged in Asia. It is not only the first Giacometti exhibition ever held in China but also the world’s largest retrospective since the 2007 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The Shanghai exhibition, featuring about 250 works loaned by the Fondation Giacometti, gives a comprehensive overview of the artist’s half-century career, including the iconic “Walking Man” (1960), “Spoon Woman” 1927 (1953 version), “Walking Woman”(1932), “The Nose” (1947) and “The Cage” (1951).

Widely viewed as the embodiment of modernism, Giacometti has long enjoyed public esteem. Annual sales of his works, according to artnet.com last year, totaled US$252 million, second only to Picasso.

Giacometti had a profound impact on the development of postwar modern art and is often called “the artist of artists.” His influence has extended to many contemporary Chinese artists.

He was born the eldest son of neo-impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti near the Swiss border with Italy. His godfather was the symbolist painter Cuno Amiet.

Giacometti attended the Geneva School of Fine Arts. In 1922, he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Rodin. While in Paris, where he worked for years, he befriended other artists such as Miro, Max Ernst and Picasso and literary icons like Samuel Becket, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet.

The Shanghai exhibition was curated by Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti, who previously served as deputy director of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou.

The Yuz exhibition lays out an intricate route for visitors to follow in viewing the works. Upon entering, visitors are first greeted by a canvas featuring a newborn baby, created by Giacometti’s father to mark his son’s birth.

The retrospective spans the artist’s career, from his early cubist and surrealist period to the 1960s.

His last work was text for the book “Paris Sans Fin,” a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places he had lived. Portrait sketches, paintings, photographs, manuscripts and other archival material in the exhibition add to a comprehensive appreciation of his art.

As a young artist, Giacometti took as his models people close to him, in particular his brother Diego, his father Giovanni, and his mother Annetta.

For many Yuz visitors, the main attraction is Giacometti’s “Walking Man,” an elongated, thin figure. It was a recurring theme in his works, along with the standing nude woman and the bust — and sometimes all three in various groupings.

In December 1958, Giacometti was commissioned to create sculptures for the public space at Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York. His work resulted in four figures of standing women. The project was never completed because Giacometti grew dissatisfied with the relationship between the sculptures and the site.

In 1962, he won the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

Last year, his “Pointing Man” sculpture sold for US$126 million at a Christie’s, an auction record for sculpture.

“Giacometti received world attention not because his sculptures fetched daunting figures at auctions but because he is an indispensable name in art history,” said Fu Jun, a Shanghai art critic.

“The figures that he sculpted are skinny and thin, mirroring the postwar human psychology of the 20th century,” Fu said. “Europeans suffered after World War II. Their psyches were fragile and lonely. Giacometti’s slender figures appear like a lonely existence on this earth.”

Some said the matchstick look of many of his figures was inspired by the prisoners in German concentration camps during the war. His “Three Men Walking (II)” in 1949 was likened by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to lone trees bare of their leaves in winter.

Indeed, for a 1961 Paris production of Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” Giacometti created a tree for the stage setting.

He worked in sometimes extreme ratios of proportions, dealing with the same subjects both in miniature and in larger-than-life size. His focus was always remained the same: to represent his models the way he saw them or remembered them.

“He worked in a studio of only 23 square meters,” said curator Grenier. “Today his sculptures are rebellious and lonely symbols. He is the most important of modern sculptors. He wanted his works to be seen by the whole world, and he achieved that. Even if you don’t know much about art, you will still be moved by his works.”

Most of Giacometti’s creations, she said, have ended up in American collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. Though ailing at the time, the artist attended an exhibition of his works at the museum in 1965.

“Our exhibition is not only a comprehensive review of his creative career but also a reflection of the culture and life of an exciting era after the war in the 20th century,” said Budi Tek, founder of the Yuz Museum.

For example, a Giacometti’s Café will feature in the exhibition ­­— a full-scale model of a cafe that the artist frequented in Paris. His legendary Paris studio will also be replicated in scale.

“What Giacometti wanted to create are not the monumental sculptures or hero-like sculptures,” Grenier said. “In his eyes, the power of sculpture was unrelated to its size.”

Giacometti died of heart disease and chronic bronchitis in Chur, Switzerland in 1966.

He was included in an exhibition of the 101 most important portrait masterpieces of the 20th century, mounted at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2001.

Giacometti and his “Walking Man I” sculpture appear on the 100 Swiss franc banknote.