nude from nature (Annette), 1954
"He had formerly been connected with the surrealists, and I remembered having seen his name and a reproduction of one of his works in L'Amour Fou. At that time he was making "objects" of the sort which appealed to Breton and his cronies, and which had only a tenuous suggestion of reality about them. But for two or three years now he had been convinced this method was getting him absolutely nowhere; he wanted to return to what he regarded as contemporary sculpture's real problem-- the re-creation of the human face. Breton had been shocked by this. "Everyone knows what a head is!" he exclaimed, a remark which Giacometti, in turn, repeated as something shocking. In his opinion no one had yet succeeded in modeling or portraying a valid representation of the human countenance: the whole thing had to be started again from scratch. A face, he told us, is an indivisible whole, a meaningful and expressive unity; but the inert material of the artist, whether marble, bronze, or clay, is, on the contrary, capable of infinite subdivision-- each little separate bit contradicts and destroys the over-all pattern by the fact of its isolation. Giacometti was trying to reduce matter to its furthest viable limits; this was how he had come to model these minuscule, almost nonexistent heads, which, he thought, conveyed the unity of the human face as it presents itself to the intelligent eye. Perhaps one day he would find some other way of counteracting the dizzying centrifugal effect of space; but for the time being this was all he could think up."