Word: giacomettis
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...last week's show were like men who, having never learned to sing, just shout. There were others who seemed not to belong in the exhibition at all. The doughnut-soft abstractions of Jean Arp, the polished simplifications of Constantin Brancusi, the striding stick-figures of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore's pierced fantasies would probably have baffled Rodin as much as they do most gallerygoers...
...Alberto Giacometti's surrealist construction, The Palace at 4:00 a.m., had tickled as many visitors as it puzzled. His new sculpture, City Square, was more serious and therefore harder to take. Giacometti had long since abandoned surrealism to carve tiny classical heads which he carried in his pocket, and progressed from them to stick-figures whose pocked and ragged flesh was stretched elastically upward to the snapping point (TIME, Feb. 2, 1948). City Square disposed five such figures, only a few inches high, on a broad bronze pedestal. All were walking determinedly, and their paths were bound...
...Sardinian sculptures were paired off in the exhibition with works by such contemporary trail blazers as Picasso, Archipenko, Braque and Giacometti. The 20th Century sculptures were similar but less meaningful, for while the Sardinian bronzes embodied something of their own culture, the moderns reflected nothing except older and more earnest...
When he took up sculpture, the plaster dust was soon ankle-deep on his studio floor, for Giacometti smashed almost everything he did. (He explained: "They were made to last only a few hours.") Sometimes his friends rescued a head or a torso or an arm. These won praise among the forward fringe in Paris and London, but not in his native Switzerland...
Restless Artist Giacometti was troubled by the fact that he couldn't do all his job at once. If he started on the tip of the nose, the rest of the face would lose shape and perspective. "The distance between one side of the nose and the other," he wrote, "is like the Sahara." Later, in an effort to grasp the whole, his sculptures began to shrink until they became so small that they would fall apart at the touch of his knife. Finally, his figures began to seem real to him only when they were long and slender...