Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed

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’. This was, you might say, a revelation of the beauty that lay in extreme thinness and fragility.

In Giacometti: Pure Presence at the National Portrait Gallery you see that process of attenuation occurring, in different ways, again and again in his art. In a bronze bust of his younger brother Diego, from 1955, the sitter’s upper body is substantial enough, but his head, with its angular profile, has become as slender as a blade.

A painting of the writer Jean Genet from about the same time (1954–5) shows the sitter, his head relatively much smaller than his torso, apparently sunk to the bottom of a large, grey tank of space.