Giacometti always said that he strove for "truth" in his works. "Art interests me greatly but truth interests me infinitely more," he once said.
At the same time, Giacometti refused to be bound by the conventions of realism. His portrait heads of 1927 are busts where the shoulders are given mass but the heads resemble plates (width, but no depth). Giacometti's busts from the mid-1950s offer an equally bizarre viewpoint: This time, the heads are not coins perched on shoulders, but long, thin buds. And in his famous full-length sculptures, the feet of the human figures are often grotesquely large.
How is disproportionately sized art "truthful"? One could say that Giacometti's elongated style reflects a fact about life: Human beings perceive the world around them subjectively. When we translate this perception into art, we make what is most important the biggest or the most intricate. Or we sketch it in first. So it seems that feet--which are easily swelled with long walking or labor--interest Giacometti immensely. It reminds me of the enlarged hands and feet in works by artists like Jacob Lawrence. It's doubtful that Giacometti's interest in the common man matched Lawrence's or that Giacometti believed staunchly in a labor theory of value. But certainly, he was interested in more than just the fineness of the silk worn by the portrait-sitter or the aristocratic whiteness of the skin.
Perception also tells us that feet can be this big if we look up at a person from a lower angle. In this sense, Giacometti's sculptures can be "true." The largeness of the feet on "Standing Woman" (1947) seem to say that the observer is an idolator, kneeling in worship before her. This is definitely a woman on a pedestal, which brings me to #3.
Reaction #1: All hail sculpture
Reaction #2: It's all relative
Reaction #3: What a confused attitude toward women