Martin Gayford

Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed

Plus: Courtauld Gallery's excellent display of Peter Lanyon's gliding paintings show a master of the 'airscape'

issue 24 October 2015

One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a spider’s web, but made of dust’, an object that was both ‘very, very fine’ and in constant motion, like a snake except that ‘no animal’, he thought, had ever made such movements: ‘light and sweeping and always different’.

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