Mythic Giacometti
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Book Overview
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 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.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0374218803
ISBN13:9780374218805
Release Date:June 2004
Publisher:Farrar Straus Giroux
Length:131 Pages
Weight:0.60 lbs.
Dimensions:0.6" x 5.5" x 8.6"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Biographical Poetry
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
Mythic Giacometti is not a straight forward biography, but it's more telling as to the subject's character than almost any true "biography" I've read. Lord's raison d'être here is casting Giacometti in the light of a mythological hero--hence, we may suppose, the title. The conceit feels a bit hokey at first, and even at the end I must say I'm not entirely convinced that Giacometti is descendent from Oedipus, but the conceit allows Lord to explore Giacometti as more than an amalgamation of facts but as a whole rounded artistic entity. And that point of view is surely more enlightening for fans of Giacometti's remarkable artistic career.
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