MINUSCULE SCULPTURES AND DRAWINGS

Between 1938 and 1944, the scale of Giacometti’s sculptures shrank, and the distance from the viewer increased. Giacometti moved during the war to Switzerland, where he spent a great deal of time with his nephew Silvio, teaching him history while sculpting him again and again in the hotel room he had turned into a studio. There he created sculptures like Small Bust on a Double Base (1940–41), and figures taken from life like Silvio Standing, Hands in Pockets (1943). Years later, Silvio recalled the process he observed while he posed for his uncle, sometimes for fifteen minutes and sometimes for an hour at a time. The artist would make a figure one day and return to it the next, working it down to half its original size until it was just eight or ten centimeters tall.

We thus have a first-hand account of how Giacometti discarded or reduced his works to synthesize them in smaller forms. The artist explained: “Working from life, I ended up creating tiny three-centimeter sculptures. I did it despite myself. I couldn’t understand it. I started big and ended minuscule. Only the minuscule struck me as a resemblance [to the model]. I understood it later: a person is not seen as a whole until one draws away and the person grows tiny.”