Product Description: From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called “the highest level of artistic excellence...read more

Product Description: Newly revised, this affordable, richly illustrated compact edition is the most definitive biographical study on the multifaceted artist and his oeuvre.Written by an internationally renowned scholar and personal friend of the artist, this new edition, revised with the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, is both an erudite and intimate study that features exclusive archival material and first hand accounts of the artist at work...read more

An authoritative monograph on Alberto Giacometti, one of the most original artists of the twentieth century, has been revised to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his death and includes an extensive biographical chronology and bibliography and nearly six hundred of his works and documents.

Product Description: Book by Yves Bonnefoy

Although Alberto Giacometti has long been recognized as one of the most original artists of the twentieth century, his life and work have not been the subject of a large illustrated monograph for many years. Yves Bonnefoy, poet, essayist and friend of the artist, has been reflecting on Giacometti's work since their first meeting, and began working on this book in 1981 while giving a series of lectures at the College de France. Yves Bonnefoy examines the entire range of Giacometti's creative production: sculpture, painting, drawing, which was the basis of the artist's work, and his lithographs-among the finest produced in this century. By focusing on the works of art themselves rather than on the details of the artist's life, and by relying on the evidence of Giacometti's important writings and statements, the author reveals the psychological and intellectual context of Giacometti's inspiration, and provides a wealth of new interpretations of his drawings, canvases and sculptures.Giacometti's early artistic development within his family circle, the impact of his voyages to Italy, the nature of his early apprenticeship in Antoine Bourdelle's studio in Paris, and his interest in African and Oceanian arts are traced with the help of contemporary accounts. Bonnefoy attributes great importance to Georges Bataille's thinking-re-evaluated here-and its influence on Giacometti's work, together with that of surrealism and the ideas of Andre Breton, whose relationship with the artist is analyzed. The periods that constituted the most significant moments of Giacometti's life are explored, especially his return to the study of the human figure in 1935, the Walking Man series in 1947, and the period of his study of 'heads' both in painting and sculpture during the 1950s. Bonnefoy's reflection on Giacometti's creative world leads him to raise important questions about the secret and profound relationship that an artist born in the mountains maintained with light, one that Giacometti sought to relive through his emotive landscapes.In writing Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work Yves Bonnefoy benefited from documentary and photographic assistance from Annette Giacometti and other members of the artist's family, friends, and the galleries that exhibited his work. This study, therefore, evokes not only Giacometti's oeuvre, but also his childhood and later environment, his studios and the works that were important to him.Bonnefoy's penetrating analysis of Giacometti's work throws much new light on issues central to the understanding of twentieth-century art as a whole. Accompanied by an extensive biographical chronology and bibliography and illustrated with nearly 60 works and documents, many of which are published here for the first time, this monograph will remain an essential for years to come.

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Product Description: Yves Bonnefoy, France's most important living poet, is also a literary and art critic of renown; in writing so extensively on the visual arts, he continues the critical tradition begun in the eighteenth century by Diderot and continued in succeeding centuries by Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and other leading French poets...read more

Translated from the French by Galway Kinnell and Richard PevearYves Bonnefoy is probably the most prominent figure in the generation of French poets who came into public view following World War II. Dedicated to poetry more as a means of spiritual illumination than as a technique for creating artistic monuments, he uses what he conceives to be the brokenness and poverty of language to enable us to glimpse a wholeness lacking in our contemporary world. This excellent translation of Bonnefoy’s early poems represents an enormous contribution to contemporary poetry, serving as an introduction to the work of Bonnefoy for those unfamiliar with his poetry as well as further evidence of his mastery for those who know his work well. (view table of contents)

Articles discuss African, European, Classical, Asian, American, and Pacific mythology

Product Description: Known both as a poet and as a literary critic, Yves Bonnefoy holds a place among the group of post-war French poets who emerged in the 1950s. This work constitutes a reference tool for scholars and critics interested in contemporary French poetry...read more

Provides English translations and the original French text of poems about nature, love, mortality, observation, and hope