The Walking and Standing Figures

The image most people carry in their heads is a single, gaunt figure in motion. Giacometti developed these elongated walking and standing figures in the years after the Second World War, working in Paris. The bodies are stretched almost past recognition. The surfaces are rough, worked and reworked, so the figure seems to be dissolving and holding itself together at once. The subject is not a particular person. It is the act of moving through space alone, which is why the works read as portraits of distance as much as of bodies.

The philosophy behind them is unusually explicit for a sculptor. Giacometti said he wanted to capture a figure as it appears from far away, small and compressed, rather than as anatomy. That is why the figures stand on large, often empty bases. The space around them is part of the subject. A reader who knows only the walking man is seeing one end of a range, and the range is worth understanding before choosing where his work might sit in a room, a question covered in more depth in how to choose between a canvas print and a framed poster.

Portraits of Diego and Annette

Giacometti painted and sculpted a small circle of faces, repeatedly, for decades. His brother Diego sat for him from youth onward and appears in more busts, drawings and paintings than any other subject. His wife Annette, whom he married in 1949, became the other great anchor. There are also portraits of his mother, of the philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, and of the writer Jean Genet, but Diego and Annette dominate. The faces are built in dense, layered strokes that never quite settle into a finished likeness.

These portraits are the clearest window into his method. He worked from the model in every session and described the likeness as perpetually out of reach, which is why the same face reappears with different degrees of resolution. The common themes in Giacometti paintings, then, are less iconographic than personal. A handful of people, one studio, one view from a window. For a sense of how a single recurring subject can anchor an entire body of work, the case of Leon Bakst's most recognizable subjects makes an instructive comparison.

The discipline of that repetition is easy to underestimate. Giacometti destroyed or abandoned work constantly, and the paintings that survive often show the sitter reduced to a grey haze of corrections. What looks like vagueness is closer to an argument with the sitter, conducted over years.

Studio Interiors and Still Lifes

The third subject group is quieter and often surprises people who know only the sculptures. Giacometti painted still lifes of apples on a table, his cluttered Paris studio, and the view of rooftops and the rue Hippolyte-Maindron from his window. The palette stays narrow. Greys, ochres, muted flesh tones, almost no saturated color. Composition matters less than the pressure of looking, so objects seem to hover and shift rather than sit still.

These interiors connect back to the figures. In both, the subject is perception under difficulty, the effort of fixing something that keeps moving. It is also why reproductions of the paintings behave differently in a room than reproductions of the sculpture photographs. A grey still life needs wall light and breathing room, a point developed in what colors work best with prints of Giacometti's work in a modern home. The apples, incidentally, recur from his early Surrealist years to the end of his life, one of the few constants across five decades.