Word: giacometti
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...done marvels with adjustment of scale to image. Each space suits its contents, whether one is looking at Daumier's 36 clay caricature heads of the Celebrites du Juste- Milieu, no bigger than grenades and as lethal, whose passionate violations of the human face would so deeply affect Giacometti a century later, or at the large, suave, marmoreal forms of Ingres and early neoclassical Jean-Leon Gerome...
...knew about -- that of going down into a cramped, cold and dangerous darkness to hew at rock -- was transcended in Moore's work as a man: still cutting stone, but in the light, and in the soothing precinct of his mother's remembered body. What anxiety was to Giacometti or sexual rage to Picasso, nurture and shelter were to Moore. His commitment to sculpture as an act of hollowing, modeling and smoothing the "body" of a single mass ran counter to the pattern of 20th century sculpture, which was to construct from disparate parts a shape that did not need...
...which sculptors angled their work away from the accepted forms of social communication via the human figure. Not because they lost interest in the figure -- on the contrary, the years 1900-1950 were rich in figure sculpture and body-haunted objects by Matisse, Picasso, Archipenko, Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because they did not want to serve the social consensus in the way that statuary did. Consequently, few public commemorative sculptures made in the past 75 years have any real importance in the modernist canon; and conversely, modern public sculpture is mostly banal in the extreme...
...from painting and music, anthropology and psychoanalysis, from the idea of the "primitive" (that escape route of a culture stuck in the gridlock of its own sophistication) and the dream of a utopian machine future. One could have a sculpture that was also a little building, like Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 A.M., 1933, or a still life, like Henri Laurens's Dish with Grapes, 1918; an image of landscape, like David Smith's Australia, 1951, or for that matter a real landscape, like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, a quarter-mile coil of rock now sunk...
...rule: rectangles, cones, cylinders) with zips of relieving color, orange, yellow or vermilion. When these work--and often they are little more than a graphic mannerism--they lend his images an indefinable air of instability, an apparitional flicker, a distant cousin of the twitching, fluttering profiles in Giacometti. But it is the density of the paint that anchors the image every time. It gives the surface a rich, fiesty eventfulness. It makes one feel the subtle breaks in an array of cakes or cold-cream jars, rather than the boredom lurking in their repetition...