Sailing to New York in 1965 for the opening of the big retrospective show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti wrote a preface to the collection of drawings later published as Giacometti: A Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings.¹ For many years he had made copies of images originated by others—a Rubens at the Borghese Gallery, a Pintoricchio at the Vatican, a Matisse or Egyptian sculptures in Paris, a Japanese print at his family home in Stampa. During his transatlantic voyage, in his mind’s eye he suddenly saw them as an interfused but not undifferentiated community of forms: “How can one describe all that? The entire art of the past, of all periods, of all civilizations rises before my mind, becomes a simultaneous vision, as if time had become space.” To his consciousness, any interval of time could be transformed into a concentrate of space: that continuous transformation was the purpose back of his daily work as an artist. Giacometti’s painting and sculpture do not represent or dramatize time’s passing and the changes it exacts. They translate the feeling of time—of present, past, and what his friend Sartre called the “project” of the future—into spatial relations, the most crucial being the changeful pressure of an empty immensity on the figures that inhabit it. The forms for which Giacometti is best known, the skinny bronzes which seem unconquerably alert to the unhoused distances on which they fix their gaze, are leached of anecdote. Though many