Mythic Giacometti |
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| Author:
| Lord, James |
| ISBN: | 978-0-374-21880-5 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 2004 |
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $20.00 |
Book Description:
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The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. He was also--as James Lord persuasively argued in
Giacometti: A Biography--a heroic figure whose vocation sustained him through a life of crippling anxiety and erotic guilt. Almost twenty years after it first appeared,
Giacometti has attained the status of a classic, one of the most candid and complete biographies of an artist in our time. In...
More DescriptionThe Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. He was also--as James Lord persuasively argued in Giacometti: A Biography--a heroic figure whose vocation sustained him through a life of crippling anxiety and erotic guilt.
Almost twenty years after it first appeared, Giacometti has attained the status of a classic, one of the most candid and complete biographies of an artist in our time. In Mythic Giacometti, Lord reveals the hidden "blueprint" of that work: a daringly literal, visionary interpretation of the myth of Oedipus as it affected the conduct and outcome of Giacometti's life. The result is a case study both in the development of an artist and in the writing of biography. Lord concentrates on the private totems of Giacometti's life-family legend, childhood memory,
illness and injury, crucial sexual encounters, intimations of mortality-that amounted, in Lord's view, to signs of a tragic destiny directly linked to the central tragedy of Western literature.