One night, as Alberto Giacometti left the house of a friend, the model Isabel Lambert, he noticed how she grew smaller as he moved farther away. Her identity and personality remained, but her form was slowly vanishing into thin air. After that fateful night, Giacometti sought to sculpt a human body as pure essence. The result—1960’s Walking Man I, cast in bronze—is often hailed as the peak of his career and an expression of his existentialism. This exhibition looks at sculpted and drawn variations of the masterpiece, the artist’s life-sized models, and a genealogy of the “Walking Man” motif that traces back to Giacometti’s surrealist sculpture Woman Walking (1932). —E.C.