Alberto Giacometti

The first manifestations of Giacometti's talent drew on the by then widespread achievements of the Avant-Garde of the 1920s and '30s. Even so, his forms in the Cubist manner, his compact volumes inspired by Africa and the Cyclades, and his volumes devoid of objects with a symbolic function in the Surrealist spirit led him inexorably around 1935 to acknowledge a flight from a reality that was far beyond reach.

He spent the rest of his life, as this book explains, exorcising this existential and formal void through a return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought to establish his contingent volume, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to seize its finiteness in a reality, however banal it might be. He began to develop heads and nudes modeled in the void, in that experience of nothingness that opposed his quest for the absolute, a metaphor of the human condition.

Giacometti's written testimony and reflections, including those from his Surrealist period, are remarkable for their aptness and their poetic quality. In them he pours out his doubts, his suffering and his hopes as a creator as artists have rarely been capable of doing.

The reproductions include: Silent Mobile Objects (1931); I Can Only Speak Indirectly of My Sculptures (1933); and Letter to Pierre Matisse (1948). The book also reprints two interviews: one with Pierre Schneider, My Long March (1961), and the other with Andre Parinaud, Why Am I a Sculptor? (1962).