The Cube and the Face: Around a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti [Paperback]

Alberto Giacometti’s 1934Cubestands 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.
           
WithThe Cube and the Face,renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis ofCube,consulting the artist’s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and afterCubewas 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,Cubemarks 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 Giacometti counted as influence, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti’s art with a new approach to transitional work.

Note
Buried Face
Face of the Orientation that Cannot Be Found
Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Volume
Face of the Cage and the Transparent Crystal
Face of the Bodies that Come Apart
Face of the Impossible Dimension
Face of the Dead Heads
Lost Face, Face of the Father
Face of Opacity and the Blind Crystal
Face of Shadow and Spacing
Melancholic Face
Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Notch
Face for Finishing with the Object
Buried Face
 
Notes
 
Elena Vogman and Mira Fliescher
In the Face of the Unface
 
Credits

“Didi-Huberman exploits the formal presence ofCubeto construct a metaphoric and polyphonic inter