The Tanks

Alberto Giacometti, Four Figurines on a Stand  1950–1965, cast c.1965–6

Giacometti based this sculpture on a memory of seeing four sex workers across a room from him in Paris several years before. ‘The distance which separated us, the polished floor, seemed insurmountable in spite of my desire to cross it', the artist recalled. The small scale of the figures and the sloping sides of the sculpture’s base recreate the strange sense of distance experienced by the artist. Giacometti made several versions of this work, including a destroyed version created in the basement of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1965.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman  c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964

During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Tall Figure II  1948–9

Giacometti said that his figures reflect his own experience of looking at people. Concerned with truly representing this, he often reworked his sculptures over long periods before casting them in bronze. He would build up and strip down the clay model several times, gradually eroding its outline and reducing the work to its essential core. Giacometti’s fragile, elongated figures have often been interpreted as a reflection of the precariousness of life after the Second World War.

Gallery label, March 2025

Daria Martin, In the Palace  2000

In the Palace is the first film in a trilogy followed by Birds 2001 (T12743) and Closeup Gallery 2003 (T12175). It constituted Daria Martin’s MFA thesis at University of California, Los Angeles and was shot with a 16mm camera and released in an edition of four. Tate’s copy is the fourth in the edition. The film is set in a scaled up twenty-five foot (7620 mm) high version of the sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), from which it takes its title. Giacometti’s sculpture is a fragile structure made of wood, glass, wire and string, and is open and accessible on all sides. When seen from the front it appears to be divided into three cages, inhabited by isolated forms and figures. Martin first saw Giacometti’s sculpture in her visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York during her student years, and became attracted to the work’s ‘particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house’ (quoted in Daria Martin, p.76). The artist measured the sculpture in MoMA’s archive for the correct proportions, and built the stage herself with the assistance of her art school friends. ‘The idea that sparked In the Palace’ Martin has explained, ‘was a desire to literally realise my own fantasy to inhabit this small sculpture, to blow it up to human dimensions and to populate it with performers’ (quoted in Daria Martin, p.76).

Alberto Giacometti, Hour of the Traces  1932

Delicate forms balance on this sculpture’s cage-like structure. The shapes are mysterious and their connections unclear, as if in a dream. The lower suspended form could be a beating heart or a stopped clock’s pendulum. Giacometti said that when making sculptures during this period he reproduced images that were ‘complete in my mind’s eye... without stopping to ask myself what they might mean’.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Bust of Diego  1955

From the mid-1950s, Giacometti concentrated on portraiture. He repeatedly drew and sculpted his immediate circle of friends and family. His brother Diego, who sat for this bust, was one of Giacometti’s most frequent models and often assisted the artist in the studio.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman  c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964

During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Woman with a Broken Shoulder  c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964

During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Bust of Annette IV  1962, cast 1965

This work is one of eight busts that Giacometti made of his wife Annette between 1962 and 1965. Although Annette was one of his most frequent sitters, Giacometti approached her anew each time she posed. The artist worked heavily on the surfaces of the sculptures. He commented that ‘after three days of working she doesn’t resemble herself anymore’.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Bust of a Man (known as Chiavenna I)  1964

This portrait of Giacometti's brother Diego was made from memory. In his later years, Giacometti was interested in the eyes of his subjects. Many of the portrait busts from this period have a penetrating and intense gaze. 'If I can hold the look in the eyes, everything else follows', Giacometti explained. In the title, Chiavenna refers to the small Italian town where the sculpture was cast, just across the border from Giacometti’s hometown of Borgonovo, Switzerland.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Woman of Venice IX  1956

In the 1940s, Giacometti began to make tall, elongated figures with roughly defined outlines. These works appear to represent the human figure seen from a distance. The artist explained that when he made large figures, they seemed ‘false’. It was only when he portrayed them as ‘long and slender’ that they truly reflected his vision of humanity. Woman of Venice IX was the last of a group of standing figures of women that Giacometti made for the French Pavilion of the 1956 Venice Biennale.

Gallery label, March 2025

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing  1947

Giacometti has said of the making of Man Pointing: ‘I did that piece in one night between midnight and nine the next morning. That is, I’d already done it, but I demolished it and did it all over again because the men from the foundry were coming to take it away. And when they got here, the plaster was still wet.’ Highlighting the figure’s theatrical pointing gesture and its skeleton-like form, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) described the sculpture as ‘always halfway between nothingness and being’.

Gallery label, March 2025