This publication and the accompanying exhibition echo Jean Genet's famous 1957 essay, L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti. Both explore the various facets of the now famous studio on rue Hippolyte - Maindron - laboratory, ritual place and major component of the artist's work. This studio where Giacometti, one of the 20th century's major artists, lived from 1926 to 1965, is purposely placed at the very core of the building, the presentation and the dissemination of his work and his own image.
The wealth of the collections of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, which come from the artist and his widow, helps us to take a close look at Giacometti's working process and the themes to which he endlessly returned ever since his early days in his father's studio at Stampa (Switzerland).
This book, which is illustrated by many hitherto unseen archives, is published under the editorship of Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, created in Paris in 2003. It includes contributions from several specialists - Michael Brenson, Thierry Dufrêne, Valerie J. Fletcher, Hélène Pinet, Véronique Wiesinger, among them - and broaches every aspect of Giacometti's output : sculptures, paintings, drawings, decorative art objects, prints, and writings... It also reproduces many photographs from his own collection, from Brassaï and Man Ray to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Matter, by way of Ernst Scheidegger and Marc Vaux.
