Alberto Giacometti. By Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. Transl. by Kit Currie.

176 S.; sehr zahlr. Illustrationen; 32 cm. Ein gutes Exemplar. - Englisch. // This work attempts the difficult task of a reevaluation of the career of the least recognized of the great twentieth century artists. Giacometti's personal life has remained a subject of continuing fascination. In some ways it has acquired emblematic status. Here is the archetypical bohemian artist who after achieving international recognition continues to occupy the same rundown studio in Paris. For Giacometti life and art embodied and expressed a persistent struggle. His was an art of obstruction: of reworking, erasing, decomposing and retrieving. The whole of his aspirations are embodied in his cry-constantly attested to-"to be able to make a head, one head, just once." Giacometti hearkens back to Cezanne's obsessive engagement with problems of perception and representation. Art was for him an onslaught on the deception of the visible. The present study examines the artist's formative years, his grappling with Cubism in the twenties and his lifelong consideration of two of the major currents of thought of our time: surrealism and existentialism. Giacometti's sculptures are of course dealt with in some detail, but this work also devotes considerable analysis to the body of his painted work. This is an area in which the artist has surely not received the consideration he deserves. As with all great art Giacometti's paintings and sculpture possess an urgency that refuses an equivocal response. They record desire, doubt and laceration. The unconcious strives toward legibility, yet the work preserves its invisibility, an opacity that frustrates interpretation. It is our painful privilege to regard the work and be scrutinized in turn. We are implicated by our participation and forced to reexamine our attempts to see the world. (Verlagstext) // Alberto Giacometti (* 10. Oktober 1901 in Borgonovo, Gemeinde Stampa; † 11. Januar 1966 in Chur) war ein Schweizer Bildhauer, Maler und Grafiker der Moderne ...Giacometti gehört zu den bedeutendsten Bildhauern des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein Werk ist vom Kubismus, Surrealismus und den philosophischen Fragen um die condition humaine sowie vom Existentialismus und von der Phänomenologie beeinflusst. Um 1935 gab er die surrealistischen Arbeiten auf, um sich den "Kompositionen mit Figuren" zu widmen. Zwischen 1938 und 1944 waren die Figuren maximal sieben Zentimeter gross. Sie sollten die Distanz wiedergeben, in der er das Modell gesehen hatte. In der Nachkriegszeit entstanden Giacomettis bekannteste Werke; in den extrem langen, schlanken Skulpturen führte der Künstler seine neue Distanzerfahrung nach einem Kinobesuch aus, in der er den Unterschied zwischen seiner Sehweise und jener der Fotografie und des Films erkannte. Mit seiner subjektiven Seh-Erfahrung schuf er die Plastik nicht als körperhafte Nachbildung im realen Raum, sondern als "ein imaginäres Bild […] in ihrem gleichzeitig realen und imaginären, greifbaren und unbetretbaren Raum". ISBN 0881682160

Alberto Giacometti; Bildende Kunst; Skulptur