Giacometti’s signature style of roughly textured, emaciated figures began to take shape in the mid-1940s, when this work was produced. It stems from the artist’s desire to depict his own perception of reality. He found this task daunting, often destroying and remaking a work several times, a process revealed in his sculpture’s jagged surfaces. Eventually, Giacometti found satisfaction in representing the human form as if seen from a distance. His craggy surfaces offer few individualized details or features, and the figure becomes so thin it almost vanishes, just as a person can be watched quickly moving out of sight.

Giacometti used this expressive distortion to suggest the anger and confusion felt by much of the world after the horrors of WWII. Man Pointing, like most of Giacometti’s figures, stands utterly alone, possessing power as well as vulnerability. This sense of isolated individualism in his work led Giacometti to be identified as the pre-eminent visual artist of existentialism.

1947, the year of Man Pointing, was a critical year in the artist's development for it marked the full realization of the style which was to characterize his work until his death in 1966. The rough-surfaced elongated figures have become a symbol of pessimism and have also become identified with Existential philosophy in the view of some critics. Giacometti, however, disavowed this interpretation and maintained that his forms were a more faithful way of recording reality, of creating objects in space. It has been noted that the rugged surfaces create a visual phenomenon in which the sculpture becomes a presence which activates the space it occupies. The sculpture is perhaps the most gestural of the artist's works, but from the outset he had planned a two-figure composition. Not until 1951 did he complete the grouping with a plaster sculpture of a standing man. The two figures were publicaly exhibited as one sculpure, But Giacometti became dissatisfied with the composition and destroyed the plaster before it could be cast in bronze. Standing alone, the sculpture is imbued with an almost imperial grandeur and, in contrast to many of the srtist's figures, it demands to be viewed from all sides; in this sense, it has a three-dimensional qaulity which is relatively rare in his work.

Source: DMAC Bulletin, July-August 1977