1. Michel Leiris, "Pierres pour un Alberto Giacometti," Brisées, Paris, Mercure de France, 1966, p. 149.

2. André Breton, L'Amour fou, Paris, Gallimard, 1937, pp. 40-57. This was originally published as L'équation de l'objet," Documents 34, no. 1 (June 1934), 17-24.

3. Breton, Documents 34, 20.

4. One of these sitters wrote a detailed account of this process, observing that "inasmuch as it was then expressed in the particular acts of painting and posing, there were elements of the sadomasochistic in our relationship . . . [although] it would have been difficult to determine exactly what acts were sadistic and/or masochistic on whose side and why." James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1965, p. 36.

5. See, Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l'Age, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, pp. 409-503.

6. Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 1974, p. 22. See also Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, London, Thames and Hudson, 1972, p. 298, fn. 15.

7. Jean Clay, Visages de l'Art moderne, Paris, Editions Rencontre, 1969, p. 160.

8. The statue came to the museum from the 1929-30 expedition of Felix Speiser and was published in 1933 in Führer durch das Museum für Völkerunde Basel, Salomonen, as figure 11 (Totanstatue, Bougainville), p. 21. In 1930 the art of the Solomon Islands was the focus of an essay in Documents that dealt with the visual and religious significance of its production. See Louis Clark, "L'Art des Iles Salomon", Documents II, no. 5 (1930).

9. See, for example, the duka figure in the British Museum, 1944, Oc.2.1177.

10. Hohl publishes the Solomon Islands figure in his monograph (p. 291, figure 30) without the "railing," although this structural support appeared in the 1933 publication of the Basel Ethnological Museum. (Subsequent to this publication of the figure, the support bars were lost.) Instead Hohl postulates the influence of Egyptian statuary for the architectural elements of Invisible Object (Hohl, 1972, p. 300, fn. 34). William Rubin has suggested Sepik River spirit figures as another possible source for the structure behind the woman's body in Giacometti's sculpture. One of these, now in the Rietberg Museum (RMe 104), was in that part of the van der Heydt collection deposited in the Musée de l'Homme in 1933 and placed on display, where Giacometti may have seen it. (I owe this information to Philippe Peltier, who has generously shared with me his knowledge of the disposition of the great collections of Oceanic art of this period.) However, a vertical structure that either flanks the body or appears to contain it is also found in New Ireland mallanggan, an Oceanic type admired and collected by the surrealists. But neither the Sepik River nor the New Ireland sculptures relate morphologically to the smooth-surfaced, generalized anatomical style of Invisible Object. Evan Maurer suggests the presence of the Caroline Islands figural type on the basis of stylistic similarity and because one of Giacometti's drawings after Oceanic objects represents such a figure. See Maurer, "In Quest of the Myth: An Investigation of the Relationships between Surrealism and Primitivism," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, p. 318. The Caroline Islands figural type, however, does not assume the bent-knee position that is so forceful in Invisible Object, nor is it supported by any structural adjunct.