woman offering bouquet, 1950
"His statues seem to belong to a bygone age, to have been discovered after night and time--who fashioned them cleverly--had corroded them to give them this feeling, at once soft and hard, of eternity passing. Or perhaps, they emerged from a crucible, the residue of terrible heat: the flames extinguished, that is what remains.
"But what flames!
"Giacometti once told me that he had the idea of sculpting a statue and then burying it. (One immediately thinks: "Let the earth be gentle to it.") Not for it to be discovered, or only much later when he himself and even the memory of his name would have disappeared.
"Was this burial an offering to the dead?..."