More and more, Giacometti found himself preoccupied with the human figure as a perennial subject of artists throughout time, and as a conduit to understanding something essential about nature and perception. He was drawn to the upright, stoic figures of Egyptian antiquity, an influence that can be seen in the attenuated form of his iconic “Standing Woman” and “Walking Man” sculptures (the gender dynamics of which would deserve an article of their own). He liked that these ancient Egyptian figures were made for the tombs of dead people, that they somehow represented a state between life and death. “He was attentive to this idea that life is fragile,” said Grenier—that death is always lurking just beneath the skin.

Giacometti returned to working with models as he had done at art school in Paris years before—staying late into the night in his studio, sketching onto the walls, painting or modeling three-dimensional figures, nearly ankle-deep in clay, compelled by a desire to reduce and refine his forms. Looking at his model (who, from the early 1940s, was often his wife, Annette), Giacometti would somewhat unnervingly comment that through her face, he could see her skull. He was interested in the ambiguity of an image or form, a vestige of his Surrealist days—the way heads could resemble frogs, and bodies could look like trees in nature, as he liked to say. In The Forest (1950),the bust of a male figure is seen amid a grove of rakish, tree-like women, a tableau that evokes the powerful twin states of anxiety and sexual desire.