GIACOMETTI. Flammarion

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901-1966)

One of the most universally admired artists of the 20th century, the Swiss-born sculptor/painter Alberto Giacometti  is best known for a series of bronzes depicting ghostly, attenuated figures made during a burst of intense creative activity inspired partly by the cataclysmic events of World War II. The largest retrospective of Giacometti's work ever mounted almost 200 individual sculptures, paintings, and drawings, shown at Zurich's Kunsthaus and New York's MoMA has generated Klemm's fine catalog, the best book on this major figure to have appeared since James Lord's definitive Giacometti: A Biography (Noonday, 1997. reprint.). In addition to the aforementioned sculptures, Kunsthaus curator Klemm has assembled a farrago of this artist's eclectic accomplishments, from his early eminence among the Parisian Surrealists onward. Worth the entire cover price is the handful of pages depicting the astonishingly agile still-life drawings from the artist's productive mid-century years. An excellent and deeply inspiring book true to its subject; recommended for all art collections. Also timed to coincide with the exhibition is the publication of an elegantly packaged, slipcased set of two thin monographs profiling Alberto and his lesser-known sibling, Diego (1902-85), a designer of furniture and objets d'art and the metal smith who cast many of his brother's major bronzes. Identical in format and size, these books are primarily a conglomeration of a few dozen photos of artwork alongside short introductory biocritical essays and brief chronologies.