This is the entire text of "No More Play" by Rosalind Krauss, one of many fascinating essays in her "The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths".

To describe Giacometti's Invisible Object as "a young girl with knees halfbent as though offering herself to the beholder (a pose suggested to the sculptor by the attitude once assumed by a little girl in his native land)" is to participate in the work of rewriting his beginnings that Giacometti himself started in the 1940s. But this cooperation on the part of Michel Leiris, as he constructed the text for the sculptor's 1951 exhibition catalogue, placing Invisible Object in the service of a simple transparency to the observable world, is an expression of the ruptures and realignments that were transforming postwar Paris.1 For this description is a slap in the face of André Breton.
Who can forget the magisterial example through which Breton opens the world of L'amour fou onto the strange but impressive workings of objective chance? Giacometti and Breton go to the flea market where each one is "claimed" by a seemingly useless object that each is impelled, as though against his will, to buy. Giacometti's purchase was a sharply angled, warriorlike mask, for which neither he nor Breton could determine the exact, original use.2 However, the point of the example was not the object's initial but its ultimate destination. This, according to Breton's account, was in the service of resolving the conflicts paralyzing Giacometti as he attempted to bring parts of Invisible Object into focus. The head, particularly, had resisted integration with the rest of the work, and it was to this problem that the mask seemed to address itself. "The purpose of the mask's intervention," wrote Breton, "seemed to be to help Giacometti overcome his indecision in this regard. We should note that here the finding of the object strictly serves the same function as that of a dream, in that it frees the individual from paralyzing emotional scruples, comforts him, and makes him understand that the obstacle he thought was insurmountable has been cleared."3 In Breton's account, then, the world of real objects has nothing to do with an art of mimesis; the objects are in no sense models for the sculptor's work. The world is instead a great reserve against which to trace the workings of the unconscious, the litmus paper that makes it possible to read the corrosiveness of desire. Without the mask, the dream, Giacometti could no more have finished Invisible 0bject than Breton, without his own trouvaille from the market, could have entered the written world of L'amour fou.

But wait: I thought Giacometti based "Invisible Object" on "a little girl in his native land"?