Word: giacometti
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Dates: during 1948-1948
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...Alberto Giacometti, their creator, a gentle golliwigged man now living in Switzerland, had spent a lifetime to achieve them. Born in 1901, Giacometti has passed from impressionism to cubism to surrealism and was dissatisfied with them all. The son of Switzerland's first great impressionist, he began drawing at five. He laughed at his father's landscapes ("Why do you paint this tree? You don't have to. Don't you see that it is already there?"). His father let the boy paint pretty much as he pleased, gently correcting him whenever he could...
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...