Giacometti

This work attempts the difficult task of a reevaluation of the career of the least recognised of the great twentieth century artists.

Giacometti’s personal life has remained a subject of continuing fascination. In some ways it has acquired emblematic status. Here is the archetypical bohemian artist who after achieving international recognition continues to occupy the same rundown studio in Paris. For Giacometti life and art embodied and expressed a persistent struggle. His was an art of obstruction: of reworking, erasing, decomposing and retrieving. The whole of his aspirations are embodied in his cry-constantly attested to-“to be able to make a head, one head, just once.” Giacometti hearkens back to Cezanne’s obsessive engagement with problems of perception and representation. Art was for him an onslaught on the deception of the visible.