The Cube and the Face

This monograph of French art theorist and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman centers around a single sculpture: Alberto Giacometti’s Cube from 1934 (Kunsthaus Zürich), possibly his most peculiar and atypical creation, being his only “abstract” sculptural work within a wider oeuvre, which consistently had the exploration of reality as its main objective.

By conducting a meticulous formal analysis of the sculpture, and consulting sketches, etchings, other sculptural works and texts of Giacometti originating from 1932 to 1935, the formative years of Cube, Didi-Huberman unwinds a net of questions, hypotheses, and historical contextualizations in which he envelops his investigation to unfold for the reader a wide spectrum of new perspectives. Cube, as it turns out, marks an exception. It is a self-containing work, barred from any stylistic kinship – and functions prismatically at the same time, delineates Giacometti’s transition from his “surrealist” to his “realist” phase and thus contains in nuce  principles which underlie his entire aesthetic understanding: the relation of the body to geometry, the problem of dimensionality, the separation between face and skull, the question of the portrait, which, in regards to this sculpture, prompts Didi-Huberman to develop the new notion of an “abstract anthropomorphism”.

Referencing the works of Freud, Bataille, Leiris and Carl Einstein, which had a lasting influence on Giacometti as well, this study presents the reader with an exuberant plurality of methodological approaches and readings. Out of a newly arising sensibility for a formal analysis, Didi-Huberman develops his very own anthropological perspective on the notion of the image.