Giacometti


Book Description

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.




Cézanne & Giacometti


Book Description

Though they were born 62 years and hundreds of miles apart, synchronicities between Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti continue to arise. Called "father of us all" by Pablo Picasso, the French Post-Impressionist Cézanne is widely regarded as the artistic bridge between Impressionism and Modernism, and he was highly influential to Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor known for his Surrealistic, elongated human forms of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The subtitle of this volume, Paths of Doubt, refers in part to both artists' refusal of the movements by which they were embraced: in Cézanne's case, Impressionism, and in Giacometti's, Surrealism. Doubt also alludes to Cézanne's late success. His legendarily bad social skills led him from the artistic hub of 1870s Paris to the French countryside, where he lived as a recluse, only attracting attention for his work when he was in his late fifties. Giacometti, conversely, found early success with the Surrealists but broke off from them in the late 40s when he began making more realistic black figurative sculptures. His doubt surfaced in statements like these: "If I could make a sculpture or a painting (but I'm not sure I want to) in just the way I'd like to, they would have been made long since (but I am incapable of saying what I want). Oh, I see a marvelous and brilliant painting, but I didn't do it, nobody did it. I don't see my sculpture, I see blackness." This unique volume sheds light on Giacometti's stylistic allusions to Cézanne and finds surprising corollaries between the two masters' lives and work.




Cézanne


Book Description

A major biography--the first comprehensive new assessment to be published in decades--of the brilliant work and restless life of Paul Cezanne, the most influential painter of his time, whose vision revolutionized the role of the painter.




Madame Cézanne


Book Description

A new account of Cézanne's complex relationship with his wife, who served as the subject of some of his most iconic portraits Paul Cézanne's (1839-1906) portraits of Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922), his wife and the subject of some of his iconic portraits, rank among the most powerful of their kind in French modernism. Yet, posterity has not been kind to Madame Cézanne. She was called a distraction, blamed for her husband's "lackluster" landscapes, and disdained for her impenetrable expression in the paintings. The reality is more complex, for while Fiquet may not have been the passion of Cézanne's lifetime, she was a willing accomplice, as model, mother of his only son, and unwavering partner against all odds. Madame Cézanne examines this unique relationship as it looks at Cézanne the painter, draftsman, and portraitist. Featuring 24 of Cézanne's oil portraits of Fiquet and most of the known drawings, Madame Cézanne both reevaluates, with insight and compassion, the long-held misconceptions about the Cézannes' unconventional marriage, and shows how Cézanne's portraits of his wife provide a lens through which to better understand his overall technique. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (11/18/14-03/15/15)




Memory and Narrative


Book Description

At a time when the memoir has never been more popular, Memory and Narrative presents an account of how the weave of life-writing has altered over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound and disruptive changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found its momentary conclusion in the body of Samuel Beckett's work. Among other issues, Olney considers the rejection of the pronoun "I" by many post-Rousseau writers; the uses of narrative in the works of Beckett, Franz Kafka, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and the role of literary memory in light of recent "memory work" from a variety of scientific disciplines. Giambattista Vico, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and Christa Wolf are some of the many writers examined in this monumental study.




Alberto Giacometti


Book Description

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton are just two of the great thinkers whose thought has been nurtured by the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which continues to resonate with artists, writers and audiences. Timothy Mathews explores fragility, trauma, space and relationality in Giacometti's art and writing and the capacity to relate that emerges. In doing so, he draws upon the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom and the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Bertolt Brecht; and recasts Giacometti's Le Chariot as Walter Benjamin's angel of history. This book invites readers on a voyage of discovery through Giacometti's deep concerns with memory, attachment and humanity. Both a critical study of Giacometti's work and an immersion in its affective power, it asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about our own time and our own ways of looking; and about the humility of relating to art.




All About Process


Book Description

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing “process art” within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist’s labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist’s role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists’ explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.




Cézanne and Beyond


Book Description

"The famous proclamation that Cezanne “is the father of us all” has been attributed to both Matisse and Picasso, and his influence has extended to a great diversity of artists thereafter. In this monumental book, a team of distinguished scholars offers the most comprehensive view to date on Cezanne’s vital role in shaping European and American art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. More than forty paintings and ten works on paper by Cezanne—many of his best-known and most admired—are juxtaposed throughout the catalogue with approximately 120 works by a range of modern and contemporary artists who found in Cezanne a central inspiration. They include Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Charles Demuth, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Fernand Leger, Brice Marden, Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, Liubov Popova, and Jeff Wall, as well as Picasso, Matisse, Johns, and Kelly. The essays offer insights into the “conversation” between Cezanne and each of these other artists, who stand on a par with his greatness. Among its many features, this book contains conceptual overviews by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr as well as an illustrated chronology." -- Publisher description.




The American Matisse


Book Description

"In a career spanning over six decades, the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) contributed substantially to the advancement of modern art. At his eponymous gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street, he showed several now legendary artists for the first time outside Europe. The collection--paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Balthus, Bonnard, Chagall, Derain, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Magritte, and the dealer's own father, Henri Matisse, among others--was donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004 by the foundation established by his widow. These extraordinary artworks are presented with informative entries addressing the circumstances of each work's creation and the dealer's relationship to the artist. In the introduction, the story of Pierre Matisse's early struggles in New York is told for the first time and illustrated with previously unpublished archival photographs."--Provided by publisher.




The Rise


Book Description

Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 2014.




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