Mythic Giacometti [Hardcover]

James Lord (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2004

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. He was also--as James Lord persuasively argued in Giacometti: A Biography--a heroic figure whose vocation sustained him through a life of crippling anxiety and erotic guilt.

Almost twenty years after it first appeared, Giacometti has attained the status of a classic, one of the most candid and complete biographies of an artist in our time. In Mythic Giacometti, Lord reveals the hidden "blueprint" of that work: a daringly literal, visionary interpretation of the myth of Oedipus as it affected the conduct and outcome of Giacometti's life. The result is a case study both in the development of an artist and in the writing of biography. Lord concentrates on the private totems of Giacometti's life-family legend, childhood memory,
illness and injury, crucial sexual encounters, intimations of mortality-that amounted, in Lord's view, to signs of a tragic destiny directly linked to the central tragedy of Western literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lord’s 1985 biography of the Italian artist Alberto Giacometti was, in his own words, "a monument dedicated to honor and perpetuate the memory, aspirations and achievements of a legendary hero." This little book, offered as a kind of coda, retells the story of the sculptor’s life as a sequence of critical moments that evoke the Oedipus story, and suggests that Giacometti had a mythic destiny, from his birth and baptism through to the demise of his father, whose funeral Giacometti was too ill to attend. Certainly his was a fraught life: the artist had an erotic obsession with feet and a ferocious attachment to his mother. On two occasions, he awoke to the unexpected company of a dead body. Lord’s exegetical treatment of these and other events, though by no means groundless, is often labored and oddly evasive, as when he advances the possibility that an early encounter with an older man was sexual. Lord presents his speculations with tortuous and unmistakably compassionate logic, yet he does not pursue the meaning or consequences of the episode. His writing has the strength of conviction, but the prose often becomes lumpy with qualification and abstraction. At 80, Lord belongs to a generation that arguably prefers to discuss art and life in terms of principle and paradigm rather than emotion or history. By pursuing his Freudian theme in isolation from the larger scope of biography, he reveals more about his own stake in the artist’s life than he does about his subject or his work. Which is perhaps as he meant it to be.
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From Booklist

Lord came to Paris during World War II and soon became acquainted with the protean heroes of the avant-garde (adventures he has eloquently chronicled in a series of memoirs), including sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Lord became the enigmatic and self-destructive genius's biographer, and Giacometti (1985) remains a gold standard among artist's biographies. Now, at 80, Lord reprises his great work, finally sharing the "tragic revelation" that served as its blueprint to "elucidate the symbolic and mythological verities" of Giacometti's extraordinary experiences. What Lord reveals in a refined biographical essay as riveting and potent as Giacometti's rarefied totemic figures are the startling parallels between the sculptor's life and the myth of Oedipus. As Lord describes Giacometti's attachment to his mother, suppressed rivalry with his artist father, obsession with feet (Oedipus means "swollen foot"), self-punishing inclinations, complicated sexuality, and the mystical evolution of his radical art, he does, indeed, trace an archetypal paradigm. By placing Giacometti firmly within the mythic realm, Lord's provocative exegesis rekindles appreciation for the heroic artist's searing, otherworldly vision. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (June 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374218803
• ISBN-13: 978-0374218805
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biographical Poetry, December 17, 2007

By 

M. Sutton "bloodandpopcorn.net" (Dallas, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mythic Giacometti (Hardcover)

Mythic Giacometti is not a straight forward biography, but it's more telling as to the subject's character than almost any true "biography" I've read. Lord's raison d'être here is casting Giacometti in the light of a mythological hero--hence, we may suppose, the title.

The conceit feels a bit hokey at first, and even at the end I must say I'm not entirely convinced that Giacometti is descendent from Oedipus, but the conceit allows Lord to explore Giacometti as more than an amalgamation of facts but as a whole rounded artistic entity. And that point of view is surely more enlightening for fans of Giacometti's remarkable artistic career.