Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) illustrates the distinction. There are very few major artists who have produced objects so physically minuscule. But the smaller and thinner his people are, the vaster the space they seem to inhabit. That’s where scale comes in.
There was a period of about five years, wrote his friend the critic David Sylvester, ‘when every figure Giacometti made (with one exception) ended up an inch high more or less.’ You encounter just such a work about halfway around Tate Modern’s big new Giacometti exhibition. Aptly entitled ‘Very Small Figurine’ (1937–9), it’s tiny: a naked woman as thin as a needle and perhaps a centimetre high. To see her at all it is necessary to peer through the glass of the case. Then she appears, like a person seen from a great distance surrounded by an enormous expanse of nothingness.
That’s the Giacometti effect. Not all his sculptures are so diminutive, otherwise Tate Modern would not have needed its grandest suite of galleries for this retrospective. But, famously, he returned to France after the war years — which he had spent in Geneva, working in a hotel room — with his entire output from the previous four years stored in six matchboxes.
After that, Giacometti’s figures and busts grew larger — in certain dimensions. Some became extraordinarily tall, while remaining immensely thin. ‘Standing Woman I’ (1960) looms above you like an idol, almost three metres tall. But there is very little to her except inordinate height. And what there is looks insubstantial: instead of being defined by firm contours — like a Rodin, say — there is a sort of flicker around her edges as if she were dissolving into the atmosphere.
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