Giacometti: Sculpture Paintings Drawings (Art Flexi Series)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Giacometti: Sculpture Paintings Drawings (Art Flexi Series) Details
From the Inside Flap While best-known for his spindly, attenuated figures, Giacometti also created brilant work in two dimensions. This book offers a scholarly assessment of his entire oeuvre and underscores the continity between the two phases of his career: the pre-1935 works, which included his Surrealist scupltures, and his post-war masterpieces. Read more From the Back Cover One of the great masters of 20th-century art, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti captured the existential loneliness of modern humanity with his spindly, attenuated figures whose life-like gazes pierce the vastness of space. Uniting more than 250 sculptures, paintings, drawings and graphic works, this extensive monograph is an exemplary overview of his oeuvre. The book underscores the continuity between the two remarkable bodies of work that characterize his career: the pre-1935 works, which included the finest of all Surrealist sculptures, and the post-war masterpieces. As a result of a profound artistic crisis that began in 1934, when Giacometti returned to working from the model and thus broke with the Surrealists, the artist began tackling the problem of situating figures in space in an entirely new way. Painting played a key role in the solutions that Giacometti found to this problem, and the discussion here of the relationship between his two- and three-dimensional works reveals him to have been as great a painter as he was a sculptor. Contributions by several notable art historians address contemporary research issues and offer a comprehensive record of Giacometti's life and work. Among the many photographs of the artist and his circle are images by such notable photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ugo Mulas and Man Ray. Read more
Reviews
First off, I would say that for 12.00, this book is an incredible buy, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a quick primer on the artist. The author writes in a very dry, "just the facts", style that neither adds or subtracts from the information given. There is little editorializing in the pages describing Giacometti's life; that is saved for a series of essays later in the book. The obvious flaw with this book is that most of the plates are in black and white. But again, given it's reasonable price, the plates are adequate.In my humble opinion, Giacometti, best known for his sculpture, could probably have had an equally great career as a painter. In self-criticism, he compared his portraits to those of Bacon, but in reality they are just as revealing and well executed.