Blog post revisiting Jonathan Silver’s 1974 article Giacometti, Frontality and Cubism.

Silver writes: “I believe a fresh approach to Giacometti’s figurative style will show that its apparent reductiveness—the insistence on frontality, the prevailing monochrome of the paintings and the attenuation of the sculptured figures—represents the common ground between contending aims and mutually limiting conditions in his artistic makeup: his highly sophisticated sense of what constituted a viable modern art, developed by his experiences as a Cubist and Surrealist, and a deeply felt need to make a human-centered art based on direct observation.”