Alberto Giacometti

The Swiss-born sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) is best known for his bronzes depicting ghostly and attenuated figures, which made him a key figure of twentieth-century sculpture.

This impressive monograph is a compilation of the in-depth studies produced over the course of a decade by Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. In contrast with the scholars who focus their analysis on the crisis of the Second World War, Ms.Wiesinger believes the real break is one of a philosophical, and not historical, nature: it is permanent and integral to the work. There is a deep unity in Giacometti’s approach to art, one that Michael Brenson underscored when he devoted his 1974 doctoral thesis to Giacometti’s pre-war works, which he first identified as the key to understanding the rest of the artist’s production. Indeed, these crises could more fruitfully be considered as oscillations, twists and turns, pendular movements or moments of epiphany. They were also plateaus for the artist to adjust and integrate his successive discoveries on the perception of reality.

In these eight short illustrated essays, supported by biographical information, the book surveys the whole of Giacometti’s career, from his relationship with his father to the importance of time and space in his work.