Giacometti in Paris

THETIMES AND WATERSTONES BEST ART BOOK OF 2023
’Marvellous . . . intimate and insightful . . . reads like a novel by Samuel Beckett’ Paul Theroux
A portrait of one of the twentieth century’s 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 the city through his art.

Arriving in Paris from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with remarkable artists and writers - from Picasso, Breton and Dalí to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett - but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city’s unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the café-terraces buzzing with radical ideas and racy gossip.

In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Parisian art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, brilliantly charts the course of the artist’s 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.

Michael Peppiatt has been writing about art and artists since 1964, when he began reviewing exhibitions for the Observer while still a student. He left London for a job as arts editor at Réalités then Le Monde in Paris, where he lived at the heart of the art and literary world for the following thirty years, becoming cultural correspondent for the New York Times and, in 1985, owner and publisher of Art International. Peppiatt is the author of a dozen books, including Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, In Giacometti’s Studio and the acclaimed memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood.