Book Description
Alberto Giacometti, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, was also one of the most enigmatic. In this major new interpretation of Giacometti and his work, art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson demonstrates how the artist’s secret beliefs and emotional scars are reflected in his evocative sculpture, drawings, and paintings. Wilson’s Giacometti was an extremely imaginative child who entwined fantasy and real-life experiences. As he matured, the artist combined fact and fancy into evolving myths, part conscious and part unconscious. Drawing on biographical data uncovered during a decade of research, Wilson reconstructs traumatic events and issues in Giacometti’s life—including family births and deaths in early childhood, world wars and their aftermath, and his intense and ambivalent relationship with his parents—and examines their profound effects on his artistic evolution. These startling new interpretations will forever change the way we understand both the man and his work.
About the Author
Laurie Wilson, professor emerita of art therapy at New York University, is an independent art historian and faculty member at the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute.
Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic, and the Man FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Alberto Giacometti, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, was also one of the most enigmatic. In this new interpretation of Giacometti and his work, art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson demonstrates how the artist's secret beliefs and lifelong fears were embodied in his evocative sculpture, drawings, and paintings." Wilson's Giacometti was an extremely imaginative child who entwined fantasy and real-life experiences. As he matured, the artist combined fact and fancy into evolving myths, part conscious and part unconscious. Drawing on biographical data uncovered during a decade of research, Wilson reconstructs traumatic events and issues in Giacometti's life - including family births and deaths, world wars and their aftermath, and his intense and ambivalent relationship with his parents - and examines their profound effects on his artistic evolution. These startling new interpretations will forever change the way we understand both the man and his work.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
The great Italo-Swiss artist Giacometti has been extensively documented in several books-most notably a catalog of a retrospective exhibition published for his centenary in 2001 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now comes this new volume by psychoanalyst Wilson, who, in the course of a thorough biography, attempts to explain some of the obsessional aspects of Giacometti's personality from a Freudian perspective not attended to in previous books. Her profile of this inexhaustibly fascinating genius is a standard psychoanalytic portrait, wherein supposed childhood traumas (e.g., the dominant, "phallic" personality of his mother) inflicted permanent scars on his sexual identity and, by extension, the art he made. This narrow view does have some thin soil on which to cling: a period during the 1930s in which Giacometti was in the thrall of the surrealists, who lent credence to ramifications of the psychosexual development of an adult creator. However, Wilson's sometimes perceptive observations about the visionary qualities of his work become derailed by her disquisitive speculations on the latent content of the artist's unconscious. This interpretive approach offers a limited window into Giacometti's aesthetic ethos and does little to explain the pure graphic ecstasy of his late line-rich paintings or his etiolated figurative sculptures. The definitive biography continues to be James Lord's Giacometti. Not recommended.-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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