Alberto Giacometti

One hundred years after his birth and a generation after his death, Alberto Giacometti is recognized as one of the small group of modern masters who dominated art during much of the 20th century. This centennial volume both celebrates his achievement and reexamines his work, contributing to a more focused concentration on the art itself. The Swiss-born Giacometti was a supremely inventive sculptor as well as a painter and draftsman of the highest distinction. Included here are many of his early Cubist-influenced and Surrealist works, often slyly humorous and allusively erotic, as well as his masterful drawings and paintings, and the elongated sculptures of the human head and figure for which he is best known. The book's three essays provide a comprehensive view of Giacometti's work and its multiple levels of meaning, examining his Surrealist years; the artist's unique concept of inner and outer vision; and his career as a whole, in formal and other terms.