ABSTRACT
In L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti's case, the first intimation of sainthood came with Jean-Paul Sartre's essay on the artist, "La Recherche de l'Absolu," published in Les Temps Modernes, in 1948, and afterward reprinted in the author's Situations III. Giacometti once spoke of his Surrealist period as his "Babylonian captivity." Giacometti's development, from the early twenties to the present day, has been rich, complicated, and various. Even among postwar artists, Giacometti has not been alone in his effort to restore the viability of the French tradition. There has, indeed, been too much talk about the differentness of Giacometti's art: too much, because such talk creates a barrier that prevents us from appreciating the many characteristics it shares in common with the other major styles of our time. The architecture of Giacometti's later sculptures, with their massive pedestals and vast, cagelike perspective, had already been postulated.
