Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under Auguste Rodin’s associate, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. It was there that Giacometti experimented with the cubist method. In 1927 his brother, Diego Giacometti, joined him as his assistant. Drawn to the surrealist movement, Alberto displayed his first surrealist sculptures at Salon des Tuileries, Paris, later that year. Before long, he was regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors of the day. Living in the creative community of Montparnasse, he associated with artists Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus, plus writers Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and Andre Breton. From 1935 to 1940 Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model’s gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out — their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, he would make your head look like the blade of a knife. After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti was a key player in the Existentialist movement, but his work resists easy categorization. Some describe it as Formalist, others argue it is Expressionist. The intention of his sculpting was usually imitation, the end products were an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He attempted to create renditions of his models the way he saw them, and the way he thought they ought to be seen. Giacometti’s figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism. Alberto Giacometti’s 1960 sculpture of a spindly man, “Walking Man I,” sold for £65 million ($104.3 million) in a Sotheby’s auction, shattering the record price for a work of art at auction to date!

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. 328 pages profusely illustrated.4 full color tipped in plates. An exhaustive monograph on the artist. Giacometti: A Biography In Pictures narrates an informal exploration of one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors. The text is interspersed with wonderful snapshots of the artist at work in the studio with reproductions of individual works. Some minor wear to dust jacket and some minor tanning to spine edge of dust jacket, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 17538
SOLD

Alberto Giacometti
Hohl, Reinhold

Bibliographic Details:

Publisher: H. N. Abrams, New York
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Sold ·