Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton are just two of the great thinkers whose thought has been nurtured by the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which continues to resonate with artists, writers and audiences. Timothy Mathews explores fragility, trauma, space and relationality in Giacometti's art and writing and the capacity to relate that emerges. In doing so, he draws upon the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom and the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Bertolt Brecht; and recasts Giacometti's Le Chariot as Walter Benjamin's angel of history. This book invites readers on a voyage of discovery through Giacometti's deep concerns with memory, attachment and humanity. Both a critical study of Giacometti's work and an immersion in its affective power, it asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about our own time and our own ways of looking; and about the humility of relating to art.
By:
Timothy Mathews
Imprint: I.B. Tauris
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 244mm,
Width: 188mm,
Spine: 24mm
Weight: 540g
ISBN: 9781780767871
ISBN 10: 1780767870
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 30 November 2013
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Prologue: Closer, Bigger, Further Away CHAPTER 1: Seeing, Feeling, Knowing CHAPTER 2: Touch, Translation, Witness: Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez CHAPTER 3: Walter Benjamin with Alberto Giacometti: the broken embraces of witness and form CHAPTER 4: Walking with Angels in Beckett and Giacometti CHAPTER 5: W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti: on reading together apart CHAPTER 6: Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin and Alberto Giacometti CHAPTER 7: The Struggle to Translate
Timothy Mathews is Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at UCL. He is the author of Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France (2006), and Reading Apollinaire: Theories of Poetic Language (1990).
