During one three-year period of creative output, Alberto Giacometti was able to fit every piece that he had made into six matchboxes, which he then carried in his pocket. Many of his plaster figures became so small they disintegrated completely. In these and all his work, Giacometti was searching for what he called “likeness,” as if reduction would reach absolute reality. “…to my great terror, my statues started growing smaller. It was really a frightening catastrophe… They were getting so small that I could no longer manage to put in any detail.” Twenty years later, he declared, “All my statues ended up one centimeter high. One touch more and hop!—the statue vanishes.”
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The relationship to what was in and around his work was Giacometti’s magnetic north. He drew and painted with rapid lines, marking the relation of ear to nose, eyes to ears, head to window, window to table’s edge, table to floor. The face vanishes then reappears, is obliterated, reassembled, crumbles, disintegrates, is encased, then erased, and finally is left––sometimes because his sitter had to leave the country or the exhibition’s deadline had passed. One model said that Giacometti would “eat up sitters.”
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The spatial dynamic was critical to him; locating himself in space, as if to ground his mercurial, relentless nature of dissatisfaction. He sought to free himself from reflexive habits and to surprise himself. When he was 56, he said he was........