Looking at Giacometti - Softcover

Sylvester, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080504163X ISBN 13: 9780805041637

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1997

Synopsis

Winner of a Venice Bienniale Golden Lion Award, Looking at Giacometti is a compelling mixture of biography and criticism, including an extraordinary interview with Giacometti.

Written over a period of forty years, Looking at Giacometti is a profound response to the art of one of modernism’s greatest sculptors. It takes students from world-renowned art critic David Sylvester’s first visits to Giacometti’s studio in the late 1940s to the author’s prolonged sitting for the artist’s portrait of him in the 1960 and reflections on his complete oeuvre after Giacometti’s death. A compelling mixture of biography and criticism, and including a sixteen-page insert of black and white photographs by Patricia Matisse, this book sheds new light on twentieth-century art and thought.

About this title

About the Author:

David Sylvester is an art critic especially renowned for his writings on Francis Bacon’s work beginning in the late 1940s. They soon became close friends and over the next forty years, he became Bacon’s Boswell: interpreter, confidant, occasional model, and sometimes agent. His many books include Interviews with Francis Bacon and About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-97.

From Kirkus Reviews:

This study is so dominated by the personality of its author that it offers only a pretentious peak at the artist himself. Art critic Sylvester (Ren‚ Magritte, not reviewed, etc.) draws on his personal association with the Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti (190166) in this compilation of disparate but often overlapping essays on the artist and his work. Neither biography nor art critical study, this book is more of an ``appreciation of the artist,'' a genre that today seems tired and dated. The old-fashioned feel extends not only to Sylvester's hushed and reverent writing but to his approach to his subject matter. Exploring issues of form and process (to the exclusion of just about everything else) in Giacometti's art, Sylvester takes on the role of the privileged intercessor. His relationship with the artist takes on an air of exclusivity as he translates for us Giacometti's intentions and musings. Self-consciously poetic and unchronological (covering a 40-year time period), these essays never really anchor Giacometti's career historically and only vaguely touch upon his personal history and brief association with the surrealist movement. Sylvester goes into great detail in his discussions of Giacometti's work, but cannot resist frequent interjections of his own presence: ``I feel within my muscles the stance of the figure, feel I am adopting the same stance, feel this so strongly that sometimes I find myself doing so in reality- -holding myself more taut and upright, squaring my shoulders, placing my hands straight down my sides.'' Giacometti as a personality begins to come alive in a chapter that recounts Sylvester's experience of sitting for a portrait. Unfortunately, this recollection pales in comparison to James Lord's far more engaging account of posing for Giacometti. Alas, the strongest suit in this otherwise outmoded study is its conclusion: an interview with Giacometti that finally allows the artist to speak for himself. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 080504163X
• ISBN 13: 9780805041637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176