Giacometti in Paris: A Life

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A portrait of one of the twentieth centurys greatest sculptors from one of our most eminent art historians Today the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. It was Paris that made him, and he in turn immortalised a certain Paris through his art. Arriving from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with remarkable artists and writers from Picasso, Breton and Dal to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the citys unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the caf-terraces buzzing with radical ideas and racy gossip. In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Paris art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, brilliantly charts the course of the artists life and work. From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage, this is an intimate portrait of an outstanding artist in exceptional times.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR MICHAEL PEPPIATT: Michael Peppiatt is probably one of the most eminent art writers of our time -- Tim Smith-Laing * Sunday Telegraph *
PRAISE FOR FRANCIS BACON IN YOUR BLOOD: Remarkable ... It captures what it was like to be in the presence of this brilliant, camp, reckless, waspish, drunken, generous, shameless character. -- Craig Brown * The Mail on Sunday *
PRAISE FOR THE EXISTENTIAL ENGLISHMAN: If youre interested in art, or writing, or Paris, it will ring bells in your head. I loved it. -- William Leith * Evening Standard *

Author Bio

Michael Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge, where he edited Cambridge Opinion and wrote exhibition reviews for the Observer. In an international career spent between London, Paris and New York, Peppiatt has written regularly for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News and Art International magazine, which he re-launched as its new publisher and editor from Paris in 1985. He is the author of over twenty books including the definitive Bacon biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised edition 2008). In 2005 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Cambridge for his work in the field of twentieth-century art. Peppiatt has also curated numerous exhibitions worldwide, and he is currently at work on a major retrospective contrasting the achievements of the two modern artists he most admires: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.