This book references all the artist's periods and media: sculpture (plaster, bronze), paintings, drawings, prints… It will allow a comprehensive view of Alberto Giacometti's creation, from early works to the surrealist period, from the return to figuration to his work from models, and to the invention of the great post-war icons. Over 230 works are represented, including several masterpieces such as Spoon Woman (1927), The Invisible Object (1934-35), Woman with Chariot (1945), The Nose (1947), and Walking Man (1960).

Giacometti’s works are separated into fourteen original sections revealing the themes favoured by the artist - the representation of the head, the face, the female body, etc. The book is punctuated by seven essays written by leading art historians who dwell on the detours and questions that mark Alberto Giacometti's creative process, but also allow the reader to discover his relationship to loneliness, melancholy, and his hard work with his models: his wife Annette, his brother Diego, his close friends. This catalogue aims to introduce the reader to another Giacometti, the one who experiments with the limits of sculpture, and the formidable painter who also practices, alongside the portrait, the genres of landscape or still life.

A comprehensive survey of the work of the legendary Swiss artist, this book illustrates and examines more than 100 of his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints

This lavishly illustrated retrospective traces the early and midcareer development of the preeminent Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), examining the emergence of his distinct figural style through works including a series of walking men, elongated standing women, and numerous busts. Rare paintings and drawings from his formative period show the significance of landscape in Giacometti’s work, while also revealing the influence of the postimpressionist painters that surrounded his father, the artist Giovanni Giacometti. Other areas of inquiry on which Alberto Giacometti casts new light are his studio practice ― amply illustrated with photographs ― his obsessive focus on depicting the human head, his collaborations with poets and writers, and his development of the walking man sculpture, thanks to numerous drawings, many of which have never been shown. Original essays by modern art and Giacometti specialists shed new light on era-defining sculptural masterpieces, including the Walking Man, the Nose, and the Chariot, or on key aspects of his work, such as the significance of surrealism, his drawing practice, or the question of space.

About the Author:

Emilie Bouvard is director of collections and scientific program at the Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

This stunning two-volume set evokes the differences, as well as the affinities, between the works of groundbreaking artists Yves Klein and Alberto Giacometti.
 
Volume one of this beautiful new book features archival images of both artists among new texts by curator Joachim Pissarro and others, as well as never- before-translated texts by Isaku Yanaihara, Dino Buzzati, and Pierre Descargues. Detailed illustrated chronologies for each artist complete volume one, while the colourful second volume includes colour plates of all the works displayed during Gagosian Gallery’s 2016 London exhibition of the same title, as well as installation images.

About the authors:

Joachim Pissarro is the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries at Hunter College in New York City. He was a curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. 

Danielle Peterson Searls is an art historian specializing in French Modernism, Romanesque art, and Islamic textiles. 
Catherine Grenier has been the director of the Fondation Giacometti since 2014. She has organized several major exhibitions of Alberto Giacometti’s work. 

Daniel Moquay is director of the Yves Klein Archives. He has organized more than forty retrospective exhibitions of Klein’s work and published more than thirty books on the artist. 

Cecilia Braschi is an art historian and former researcher at the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti (2005–2011). She has curated exhibitions of and written extensively on Alberto Giacometti. 

Richard Calvocoressi is the former curator at the Tate Gallery, London (1977–1983), as well as the former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (1987–2007) and of the Henry Moore Foundation (2007–2015).

Alberto Giacometti forged a singular path within European Modernism, restlessly seeking a new language for sculpture as a double of reality. Presenting some 100 sculptures and paintings, the publication tracks the evolution of Giacometti’s work from Post-Cubism through Surrealism to post-war Realism.

Throughout his life, Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was in conversation with some of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. By highlighting three writers – Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett, with whom the artist sustained lasting friendships – the publication examines how these dialogues may be traced in Giacometti’s oeuvre.

The lavishly illustrated book not only provides an overview extending from his early to his later works, and newly commissioned essays but also presents important historical texts by the three authors and the artist himself.