A Giacometti Portrait
by James Lord
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Cezanne & Giacometti: Paths of Doubt
by Donat Rutimann
from Hatje Cantz
Though they were born 62 years and hundreds of miles apart, synchronicities between Paul Cezanne and Alberto Giacometti continue to arise. Called "father of us all" by Pablo Picasso, the French Post-Impressionist Cezanne is widely regarded as the artistic bridge between Impressionism and Modernism, and he was highly influential to Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor known for his Surrealistic, elongated human forms of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The subtitle of this volume, Paths of Doubt, refers in part to both artists' refusal of the movements by which they were embraced: in Cezanne's case, Impressionism, and in Giacometti's, Surrealism. Doubt also alludes to Cezanne's late success. His legendarily bad social skills led him from the artistic hub of 1870s Paris to the French countryside, where he lived as a recluse, only attracting attention for his work when he was in his late fifties. Giacometti, conversely, found early success with the Surrealists but broke off from them in the late 40s when he began making more realistic black figurative sculptures. His doubt surfaced in statements like these: "If I could make a sculpture or a painting (but I'm not sure I want to) in just the way I'd like to, they would have been made long since (but I am incapable of saying what I want). Oh, I see a marvelous and brilliant painting, but I didn't do it, nobody did it. I don't see my sculpture, I see blackness." This unique volume sheds light on Giacometti's stylistic allusions to Cezanne and finds surprising corollaries between the two masters' lives and work.
Henri Cartier-Bresson And Alberto Giacometti: La Decision De L'oeil / The Decision Of The Eye
from Scalo Publishers
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) became friends in the mid-1930s in Paris. Both were seeking a way out of surrealism that would lead back to reality. Giacometti returned to life studies, Cartier-Bresson exchanged his brush for a camera. The content of this volume revolves around the many mutual resonances in the work of these two great artists. The book opens with shots of Giacometti taken by Cartier-Bresson over a period of three decades. At the same time, the inner workings of the artists' friendship is illuminated by a comparison between the two as draughtsmen—both searching for the 'instant décisif'—and by the question of how the photographs of one and the paintings and drawings of the other are used in por-traiture. This is a unique encounter of two giants of 20th century art and photography!In their essays, Tobia Bezzola, curator at the Kunst-haus Zurich and Yves Bonnefoy, poet and writer, not only follow the traces of this exceptional friendship with accuracy, but also place the work and visual dialogue between the two creative voices within the frame of the history of surrealist and Modern Art.This book was produced in collaboration with Henri-Cartier Bresson, the Alberto Giacometti Foundation and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.
Alberto Giacometti: Works, Writings, Interviews (Essentials Poligrafa)
by Angel Gonzalez
from Poligrafa
Alberto Giacometti's early Surrealist and Cubist forms, compact volumes inspired by Africa and the Cyclades, eventually led this seminal twentieth-century Swiss artist to acknowledge a formal void that he would spend the balance of his career filling with the human figure. In the mid-1930s, influenced by the terrible social and political changes that were taking place across Europe, Giacometti began to develop heads and nudes in a signature style--they were universally elongated, skeletal, haunting, solitary and above all, transcendent. Giacometti's written testimony and reflections on his change of perspective, and on his artistic ideas and goals, are remarkable for their aptness and poetic quality. In his writings, gathered here, the artist pours out his doubts, his suffering and his creative hopes as very few artists have been capable of doing before or since.
Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work
by Yves Bonnefoy
from Flammarion
Mythic Giacometti
by James Lord
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Behind the Mirror: Miro, Calder, Giacometti, Braque (from the Maeght Collection) (Royal Academy of Arts)
by Nicholas Watkins
from Royal Academy Publications
This handsome book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, demonstrates the achievement of the famous Galerie Maeght, one of the most influential and creative galleries of the modern era.
Focusing on the four artists at the heart of the collection of the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght – Miró, Calder, Giacometti, and Braque – the book also examines the remarkable contribution that Aimé Maeght, founder of the collection, made to art in the mid-twentieth century as a collector, dealer, exhibition-maker, and publisher. Capturing the bold spirit of postwar art in France, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern art.
Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture in Plaster
from Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess
Sculptors have long been fascinated, even seduced, by the possibilities of the human body. From classical Greece’s Doryphoros to Michelangelo’s David, the nude has captivated artists and viewers alike with its simplicity and power. One of the most arresting interpreters of the human form is Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), renowned for haunting nudes so prophetic for the moderns that they were claimed by the surrealist, existentialist, formalist, and expressionist movements in turn. Now, intensely personal photographs of Giacometti’s work are available for the first time in print in Ernst Scheidegger’s Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture in Plaster.
Alongside personal commentary documenting his twenty-year friendship with the sculptor, Scheidegger here presents photographs he took at Giacometti’s Paris studio and family home in Switzerland. These striking images document Giacometti’s little-seen work in plaster, the intermediate stage of his artistic process before the final bronze casting. They vividly evoke how the sculptor worked and offer unique insight into Giacometti’s creative process.
The images are accompanied by curator Christian Klemm’s critical essay on the sculptor who revolutionized the art world and entranced a 1930s Parisian milieu that included Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Giacometti’s later razor-thin, skeletal nudes, Klemm argues, reflect the devastation of postwar Europe and the angst of a generation. This rich collection of photographs provides a surprising new perspective on the way that Giacometti gave his artistic vision physical form.
Alberto Giacometti: The Complete Graphics
by Alberto Giacometti
from Alan Wofsy Fine Arts
+++
