Alberto Giacometti’s most familiar figures were not his only answer to modern life — and a new book argues that the missing decade is the key to understanding why.
For years, the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) has been read through two dominant chapters: his Surrealist experiments in the 1930s and the attenuated, upright figures that made him one of the defining sculptors of the postwar era. But Joanna Fiduccia’s new book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, shifts attention to the period between 1935 and 1945, when Giacometti turned to plaster head studies, live models, and tiny figures mounted on square bases.
Fiduccia, a Yale art historian, treats those years not as a pause before maturity but as a decisive hinge in Giacometti’s career. Her argument is that the artist’s work during this decade was shaped by overlapping forms of crisis — personal, political, and historical — and that those pressures altered how he thought about likeness, scale, and form. In her reading, the familiar opposition between abstraction and resemblance begins to look less stable than art history has often suggested.
That revision matters because these works were largely sidelined in the Museum of Modern Art’s centennial retrospective in 2001, where only two appeared as way stations on the path to the later sculptures. Fiduccia instead places them at the center of the story, showing how Giacometti’s return to the human head and the miniature figure was not a retreat into conservatism. It was a more unsettled inquiry into what it meant to represent a body in an era marked by nationalism, war, and fracture.
The book also reopens a crucial episode in Giacometti’s relationship with Surrealism. After André Breton criticized him for returning to sculpting human likenesses, Giacometti broke with the group. Fiduccia’s account suggests that this break did not simply mark a clean stylistic turn. It exposed a deeper tension in his practice: the desire to capture what Giacometti called the “totality of life” while working through forms that became smaller, more fragile, and more uncertain.
That paradox gives the overlooked decade its force. The plaster heads and pin-sized figures do not read here as detours. They emerge as works in which Giacometti tested the limits of sculpture itself, building and undoing form at once. Seen this way, the artist’s later, elongated figures appear less like an inevitable destination than one outcome of a far more unstable and searching career.
