A portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors from one of our most eminent art historians

THE TIMES 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.

"Giacometti’s beanpole people became icons of 20th-century art and Michael Peppiatt’s compelling portrait cuts to the core of the sculptor’s “strange life and his stranger fame” . . . Appalling and fascinating. You’ll never look at a Giacometti the same way" - The Times: 12 Best Art Books of 2023

"This book is not only a wonderful portrait of Giacometti, but also of many of his friends and associates. Peppiatt is at home in the whole Paris cultural scene and hops merrily from La Coupole to Les Deux Magots to Café Flore, picking up fascinating details along the way" - Spectator

"This book is an elegy for two missed things: an artist feted as a genius and the city he chose to live in . . . Giacometti in Paris is rich in anecdotage" - Literary Review

"An elegant, authoritative biography – Peppiatt knows his artistic onions, to be sure" - Telegraph

"Peppiatt’s telling of Giacometti’s story is insightful and sprightly . . . Paris in the années folles is atmospherically rendered, the scene-painting lively and louche" - The Times

"Personal and appealingly painterly, this is an immensely readable biography of the man and the city" - Observer

"Informative, affective, and vibrant . . . Giacometti in Paris is, then, a book as much about the triumphs and the dangers of obsession as anything else" - Arts Desk