When we look at a painting hanging on an art gallery wall, we see only what the artist has chosen to disclose--the finished work of art. What remains mysterious is the process of creation itself--the making of the work of art. Everyone who has looked at paintings has wondered about this, and numerous efforts have been made to discover and depict the creative method of important artists. A Giacometti Portrait is a picture of one of the century's greatest artists at work. James Lord sat for eighteen days while his friend Alberto Giamcometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in its various stages. What emerged was an illumination of what it is to be an artist and what it was to be Giacometti--a portrait in prose of the man and his art. A work of great literary distinction, A Giacometti Portrait is, above all, a subtle and important evocation of a great artist.

"Space does not exist," the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) wrote in 1949. "It has to be created... Every sculpture made on the assumption that space exists is wrong, there is only the illusion of space." This fascinating statement serves as a conceptual underpinning for Hatje Cantz's new appraisal of the artist's mature work. Giacometti's emaciated sculptures have long been seen as symbols of a newly anxious, frail humanity. But more recently, attention has come to focus on the relevance of his work for contemporary considerations of space and time. Alberto Giacometti: The Origin of Space supplies a comprehensive overview of the later works of this lastingly influential artist, presenting 200 color images of sculptures, paintings and drawings.

The work of one of the towering creative spirits of the century, Alberto Giacometti's visionary sculptures and paintings from a testament to the artist's intriguing life story. From modest beginnings in a Swiss village, Giacometti went on to flourish in the picturesque milieu of prewar Paris and then to achieve international acclaim in the fifties and sixties. Picasso, Balthus, Samuel Beckett, Stravinsky and Sartre have parts in his story, along with flamboyant art dealers, whores, shady drifters, unscrupulous collectors, poets and thieves. Women were a complex yet important element of his life--particularly his wife, Annette, and his last mistress and model, Caroline--as was the intimate relationship he shared with his brother Diego, who was both Alberto's confidant and collaborator. James Lord was personally acquainted with Giacometti and his entourage, and combines firsthand experience with a unique knowledge gathered during many years of observation and research. In this exceptional biography Lord unfolds the personal history of a man who managed to achieve a heroic destiny by remaining utterly true to himself and to his calling. Giacometti: A Biography was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. James Lord has subsequently published three volumes of memoirs. In recognition of his contribution to French culture he has been made an officer of the Legion of Honour.

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. He was also--as James Lord persuasively argued in Giacometti: A Biography--a heroic figure whose vocation sustained him through a life of crippling anxiety and erotic guilt. Almost twenty years after it first appeared, Giacometti has attained the status of a classic, one of the most candid and complete biographies of an artist in our time. In Mythic Giacometti, Lord reveals the hidden "blueprint" of that work: a daringly literal, visionary interpretation of the myth of Oedipus as it affected the conduct and outcome of Giacometti's life. The result is a case study both in the development of an artist and in the writing of biography. Lord concentrates on the private totems of Giacometti's life-family legend, childhood memory, illness and injury, crucial sexual encounters, intimations of mortality-that amounted, in Lord's view, to signs of a tragic destiny directly linked to the central tragedy of Western literature.

Gathered writings from the seminal 20th-century Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti Alberto Giacometti's early Surrealist and Cubist forms, compact volumes inspired by Africa and the Cyclades, eventually led this seminal twentieth-century Swiss artist to acknowledge a formal void that he would spend the balance of his career filling with the human figure. In the mid-1930s, influenced by the terrible social and political changes that were taking place across Europe, Giacometti began to develop heads and nudes in a signature style--they were universally elongated, skeletal, haunting, solitary and above all, transcendent. Giacometti's written testimony and reflections on his change of perspective, and on his artistic ideas and goals, are remarkable for their aptness and poetic quality. In his writings, gathered here, the artist pours out his doubts, his suffering and his creative hopes as very few artists have been capable of doing before or since.

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.