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The Cube and the FaceAround a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Georges Didi-Huberman - The Cube and the Face
Renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman conducts a careful analysis of CubeGiacometti's only abstract sculptural work.
Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist's sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional—a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist's surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti's aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait—or what Didi-Huberman terms “abstract anthropomorphism.” Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others whom Giacometti counted as influences, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti's art with a new approach to transitional work.
Art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman (born 1953) is a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He published more than fifty works and is a multiple award winner in many prestigious prizes.
Edited by Elena Vogman and Mira Fliescher.
Translated from the French by Shane Lillis (original title: Le Cube et le visage – Autour d'une sculpture d'Alberto Giacometti, Editions Macula, 1993).
 
published in April 2015
English edition
14 x 22,5 cm (softcover)
248 pages (81 b/w ill.)
 
29.95
 
ISBN : 978-3-03734-520-7
EAN : 9783037345207
 
in stock
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