Looking at Giacometti

the long version

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was one of the century's greatest sculptors and painters. Famous in the 1930s for his surrealist works, he suddenly isolated himself in the mid-1940s and began obsessively to make and remake sculptures and paintings (sometimes entirely demolishing and rebuilding a sculpture several times in a day), wrestling with complex problems of perception and representation. By the mid-1950s he had established a reputation as one of the most startlingly original artists of the twentieth century. Written over a period of forty years - from David Sylvester's first visits to Giacometti's studio in the late 1940s to the author's prolonged sitting for Giacometti's portrait of him in 1960 to the meditations on the artist's completed oeuvre after his death - Looking at Giacometti is a profound response to Giacometti's art. A compelling mixture of biography and criticism, it casts a bright light on twentieth-century art and thought. An interview with Giacometti - published here in its entirety for the first time - rounds out this original and valuable book.