Project for a Passageway (Maquette)

Projet pour un passage' testifies to Giacometti’s engagement with the culture of sub-Saharan Africa, which was attracting great interest in avant-garde circles at the time. At first glance the curved shapes resemble models of earth buildings, with the plaster trees in the second-to-last courtyard and the vessels in the rearmost chamber complementing the illusion. The title thus becomes a reference to ‘rites of passage’ and in particular the initiation rites of puberty.
Viewed from above as an organic whole, the sculpture can also be read as a recumbent woman. The idea of conceiving a sculpture as a ‘model’ is ground-breaking, as is the idea of an architectural ‘environment’ through which the viewer could walk if it were executed in life size.