One hundred years after his birth and a generation after his death, Alberto Giacometti is recognized as one of the small group of modern masters who dominated art during much of the 20th century. This centennial volume both celebrates his achievement and reexamines his work, contributing to a more focused concentration on the art itself. The Swiss-born Giacometti was a supremely inventive sculptor as well as a painter and draftsman of the highest distinction. Included here are many of his early Cubist-influenced and Surrealist works, often slyly humorous and allusively erotic, as well as his masterful drawings and paintings, and the elongated sculptures of the human head and figure for which he is best known. The book's three essays provide a comprehensive view of Giacometti's work and its multiple levels of meaning, examining his Surrealist years; the artist's unique concept of inner and outer vision; and his career as a whole, in formal and other terms.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Alberto Giacometti, the elegant catalog for a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, seeks to counter overly literary or psychological interpretations of an artist who has long been viewed as a poster boy for existentialism. The atmospheric black-and-white halftones and color plates are organized in closely interrelated, chronological groups to support texts by several experts, including Christian Klemm, curator of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation. By focusing on the work itself--which includes paintings and drawings as well as the famously slender, elongated sculptures--the authors emphasize his exquisitely calibrated response to the roles played by perception and memory. In the portraits, for example, networks of fine lines dematerialize a sitter's face yet preserve her essence. Anne Umland's intriguing discussion of the roles of photography and the fetish in Giacometti's surrealist-era sculpture is one of the many pleasures of this book. --Cathy Curtis
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
One of the most universally admired artists of the 20th century, the Swiss-born sculptor/painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) is best known for a series of bronzes depicting ghostly, attenuated figures made during a burst of intense creative activity inspired partly by the cataclysmic events of World War II. The largest retrospective of Giacometti's work ever mounted almost 200 individual sculptures, paintings, and drawings, shown at Zurich's Kunsthaus and New York's MoMA has generated Klemm's fine catalog, the best book on this major figure to have appeared since James Lord's definitive Giacometti: A Biography (Noonday, 1997. reprint.). In addition to the aforementioned sculptures, Kunsthaus curator Klemm has assembled a farrago of this artist's eclectic accomplishments, from his early eminence among the Parisian Surrealists onward. Worth the entire cover price is the handful of pages depicting the astonishingly agile still-life drawings from the artist's productive mid-century years. An excellent and deeply inspiring book true to its subject; recommended for all art collections. Also timed to coincide with the exhibition is the publication of an elegantly packaged, slipcased set of two thin monographs profiling Alberto and his lesser-known sibling, Diego (1902-85), a designer of furniture and objets d'art and the metal smith who cast many of his brother's major bronzes. Identical in format and size, these books are primarily a conglomeration of a few dozen photos of artwork alongside short introductory biocritical essays and brief chronologies. Next to Klemm's hefty volume, each of these works feels more like a repackaged article from a glossy art journal, suitable as an attractive gift book but providing little for most library users. Nonetheless, as the only title currently available on the younger Giacometti, the set can be recommended for more comprehensive collections. Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very good survey,
By Claude Reich (Florianopolis, Brazil and Paris, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Alberto Giacometti (Hardcover)
Surprisingly enough, there are comparatively few quality publications on Giacometti, one of the greatest artists of the XXth century. This catalogue for an exhibition that was held at the Moma and at the Kunsthaus Zurich, draws on the extensive Giacometti holdings of both museums for a comprehensive survey of his career. From his surrealist period to his trademark elongated figures, from his numerous drawings which served as studies both for his sculptures and his paintings, to his lesser-known oils, the whole career and output of the artist is very well illustrated in a book that I highly recommend.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Drawings and Paintings,
By Jim Lourie (James Lourie) "artist" (Bellingham, WA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Alberto Giacometti (Hardcover)
In addition to his familiar sculptures, this book has quite a few drawings and paintings of the master. What a painter!
0 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Giacometti: Alienation and estrangement,
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This review is from: Alberto Giacometti (Hardcover)
Giacometti well expressed the alienation and estrangement of the human condition in his sculpture.
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