Alberto Giacometti - Hardcover

Giacometti, Alberto; Lanchner, Carolyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0870703390 ISBN 13: 9780870703393

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

From the Publisher:

Exhibition Schedule: Kunsthaus Zürich, May 2001; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 2001

About this edition

• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0870703390
• ISBN 13: 9780870703393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Baumann Felix, Klemm Christian