Giacometti: Pure Presence

This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, looks at the various phases of the artists career and explores in detail his depiction of his main sitters, including his mother; Diego his brother; his wife Annette; Jean Genet the playwright; Caroline, a prostitute; and his friends Yanaihara and Lotar. Early drawings, paintings and sculptures of members of his family and his own image demonstrate Giacomettis awareness of post-­- impressionist and divisionist styles. After moving to Paris in 1922, until the late 1930s he made progressively abstracted images of a range of sitters. From 1946 Giacometti resumed painting and depicting an individual human presence became central to his work. After 1954, when he began making sculpture from life, increasingly his portraits evolved as the outcome of an ongoing dialogue between painting and sculpture. Giacometti subjected the human image to a radical process of interrogation and transformation in which the exploration and representation of flesh, presence, distance and space are vital, interacting elements. As a result, a human presence seems poised between being and non-­- being, providing the basis for Giacomettis reputation as one of the most innovative artists of the last century.