For Giacometti, no artist had ever surpassed the artists of this period, and the works he produced in the second half of his career attempted to bridge the gap between the modern world and archaism. Like Egyptian statuary, Giacometti wanted his sculptures to survive long after his death. Genet sees Giacometti’s figures as both contemporary and timeless. Statues that could have been found on an archaeological site, but which at the same time are completely of their time. Varying in scale from the smallest (less than 2 centimeters) to the largest (almost 3 meters), but never to scale 1, Giacometti attempts to convey reality not

as it is and as modernists have represented it thanks to perspective, but as he sees it. This relationship with perception, which was to occupy him relentlessly throughout his life, is particularly visible in this sculpture: the blurred effect, the absence of distinctive features, are indicative of this vision from a distance that he favored. As he said in an interview about a woman walking away on Boulevard Saint Germain: at this distance, she was only this tall, and I could no longer make out her features.

With the figurine series, Giacometti sought to escape naturalism: if the model is nude, it’s an abstract nude, with blurred features. The 1950s were marked by research into the human figure and, as he would do with the heads, Giacometti tried to escape from particularism to achieve something more universal, reducing as far as possible to the limit of recognizability without ever falling into pure abstraction.