The second thing is his absolute dedication to his work. He had a reasonable degree of early success in the late twenties and early thirties with the sculpture he made while he was associated with the Surrealists. After he broke with them in about 1935, he found himself making clay models that were smaller and smaller, to the point where they would crumble into fragments. So the next day he would start again, working perhaps all day on the process of adding clay to a wire support and then paring it down again, until it collapsed once more. This how James Lord describes the beginning of this journey:
Since he had begin to feel that he might never succeed in sculpting a head to his satisfaction, Alberto decided to try making a complete figure. Working directly in plaster, he started with a figure about eighteen inches high, representing a nude woman standing with her arms at her side. As he worked, he found to his amazement, and to his consternation, that the sculpture grew smaller and smaller. The smaller it grew, the more troubled he became; yet he could not keep it from shrinking ... After several months of work, the figure had shrunk to the size of a pin, standing in precarious isolation upon a pedestal several times its own height ... Bewildered, alarmed, he began again with a figure the same size as the first. Again it shrank while he worked on it, growing smaller and smaller despite his reluctance and distaste, finally ending as tiny as the first. Again he began. Again the outcome was the same. However, he could not stop. Sometimes the figure grew so miniscule that a last touch of the sculptor's knife would send it crumbling into dust. (Giacometti, James Lord, Chapter 27.)And he went on doing this for day after day, for years, up to the outbreak of the second World War, in hotel room in Switzerland where he stayed during the war, living off scraps and almost starving, and then picking up again when he was able to return to Paris after the war. It was only in 1948 that Giacometti had a large scale sculpture show, and that was in Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York. This was when the world saw for the first time the tall, thin, attenuated pieces that marked Giacometti's mature style and which have become instantly recognizable as being from his hand. But think of the gestation period: how many of us would be capable of trying to make the same piece of work, at every available hour of day and night, for more than four thousand three hundred days, with no goal or finish line in sight?
That's dedication.
