A favourite Giacometti story repeated by Michael Kimmerman, via Cahiers du Doute.
In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.
But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. “It isn’t the lack of a visa that’s stopping me coming back,” he wrote to her. “I can come back when I like. It’s my sculpture that’s keeping me.”
It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years’ worth of work in six matchboxes.
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