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Between 1939 and 1945, Alberto Giacometti produced a startling body of work: figures so minuscule that they could be housed in a matchbox. Join Michael Brenson and Joanna Fiduccia, author of the new book Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2026), as they explore the aesthetic daring and existential urgency of these tiny sculptures. Together they will consider what this period of apparent contraction and obscurity might teach us about the outsized stakes of making art in times of social crisis.

Joanna Fiduccia is assistant professor of the History of Art at Yale University, where she specializes in modern European art and the historical avant-garde. She is the author of Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2026). Her scholarship and art criticism have appeared in publications including October, Art History, West 86th, Artforum, Spike, and Parkett, as well as numerous catalogues. She is also a member of the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the Friends of Attention, a group of artists, scholars, and activists concerned with forms of attention that resist financialization.

Michael Brenson has been thinking and writing about Alberto Giacometti for more than fifty years. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Giacometti’s Cubist and Surrealist work, then articles on Giacometti sculptures, books and exhibitions for Art in America and The New York Times, then catalogue essays for Giacometti exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museo del Prado. He has lectured on Giacometti at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and MoMA, organized and moderated panels on Giacometti for New York University and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and was on the board of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris during its first eight years (2003-2011). He is the Artistic Director of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation. His friendship with Jonathan Silver, a sculptor and revered teacher at the Studio School, developed when Silver, too, was researching an art history Ph.D dissertation on Giacometti, on his painting.