One of the Giacometti's chief preoccupations, he explained to us, was to discover the particular accent or relationship that enables us to identify a person we know off in the distance - to realise that it isn't just a man or a woman, but one particular man or woman.
'A man far away has no more individuality than a pin if we don't know him,' he said. 'If he's someone we known, we recognise him and he assumes an identify for us. Why? It's the relationship between his masses and quantities. If he's hollow-eyed, the shadows on his cheeks are longer. If he has a large, bold nose, there's a stronger patch of light in that spot, and he's no longer the anonymous pin. So it's the sculptor's job to make those humps and hollows create an identity by highlighting the essential points that tell us this is one person rather than another.'
Life with Picasso
Françoise Gilot
