Scale of the Nation: Alberto Giacometti's Miniature Monument

Abstract

In 1939, Alberto Giacometti proposed an unusual work for the Swiss National Exhibition: a tiny head placed on a wide pedestal, which gave rise to dramatic scalar effects. This essay places this little‐known episode at the origin of Giacometti's post‐war experiments with scale, and argues that those experiments emerged out of a historical context – Switzerland's tense negotiation of national identity in the 1930s – in which monumental forms of sculpture could no longer fulfil their political functions. By untethering the bigness of a monument from its scale, Giacometti's little head disclosed scale's more profound social operation: to formalize and embody our historical practices of engaging with vast structures, including the political structure of the nation. This alignment of aesthetic and political scale suggests how a new phenomenological account of modern sculpture, indebted to Jean‐Paul Sartre rather than Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, calls into question modernism's supposed negation of the monument.