I have been thinking a lot about Alberto Giacometti lately. When I was in grad school, professors would tell me my work was reminiscent of Giaocometti’s and from the few pictures I could find, it appeared to be so. Then, just before my second year of school, I purchased a small book on his work released to coincide with his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.
Giacometti is mostly remembered by his later work - rough, elongated figures rooted solidly to their bases with oversized feet. Most viewers, myself included, find the figures evocative of the loneliness and isolation that we all feel at times in our lives. So I was startled to read in the book’s introduction, by Peter Selz, that Giacometti was striving to "discover the visual appearance and to render it with precision - not the reflections of light which occupied the Impressionissts, nor the distorted view of the camera which fails to register distance, but the object as it is contained in space, as seen by the human eye, the artist’s eye." Giacometti was trying to "render precisely what he sees at a given distance. This distance - which creates the space containing the object- has become absolute: it is about nine feet, the distance from which his glance, focusing on the model’s eye, can organize the whole." He was never striving to evoke an emotional response, he simply wanted to render exactly what his retina saw. And, because I have been blind in one eye since birth, I quickly realized that I would never be able to see that period of his work as he did, because I will never see with the binocular depth of field that he was trying to capture. 
My favorite piece from this time period is Dog, 1951. About it he wrote, "It’s me. One day I saw myself in the street just like that. I was the dog." I think I like it because if what he wrote is true, it is evidence that at times even Giacometti could not keep thoughts and feelings from imposing themselves on his mission to precisely capture the world as he saw it.
But mostly I am drawn to his earlier surrealistic work, when he still seemed to be trying to say something with his sculpture. Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1934-35, is particularly intriguing. Giacometti later wrote about the piece that he "could have destroyed it. But I made this statue for just the opposite reason - to renew myself. Perhaps this is what makes it worthwhile."
And I relate to his struggle to find his way in art, a struggle that has been well documented by historians. Irene Gordon captured the image of that struggle best when she wrote in a chronology of his life that in 1940 he abandoned working with a model and worked from his imagination, which lead to a series of minuscule figures. From 1942 - 1945, he lived in Switzerland where "the problem of the tiny figure continued, and when he left Switzerland to return to Paris his entire production of those years was said to fit into 6 matchboxes." At one point, when I was struggling to find my way, my art, I lined up six boxes of kitchen matches (surely she did not mean the smaller version), imaging three years of work in them. I did not feel so alone.
In 2001, The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major show of Giacometti's work. A flash on-line presentation was prepared to accompany the show and is still viewable at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2001/giacometti/start/goflash.html.
