This book explains Giacometti's purpose: to exorcise an existential void through his artistic return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought tirelessly to establish the contingent volume of his figures, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to place the finiteness of the humanoid frame in reality. He began to develop heads and nudes modelled in the void. During that experience of nothingness, which opposed his quest for the absolute, he discovered a metaphor for the human condition.