Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism

Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism

Fiduccia, Joanna

Hardcover

Art HistoryIndividual ArtistsSculpture & Installation

ISBN10: 030026318X
ISBN13: 9780300263183
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Apr 7 2026
Pages: 232
Weight: 2.20
Height: 0.82 Width: 8.31 Depth: 10.27
Language: English
A major reevaluation of a towering figure in twentieth-century art and the relationship of his sculpture to the crisis of nationalism in modern Europe

In 1935, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) abruptly abandoned his surrealist experiments and devoted himself to sculpting portrait busts and minuscule figurines, many no larger than a fingernail. Joanna Fiduccia traces the origins and progression of Giacometti's notorious artistic crisis, revealing its connection to a broader crisis of national identity in modern Europe. In this decade-long interval, the central features of his artworks--their turbulent surfaces, unsettling generality, severely reduced scale, and compulsive repetition--gave form to the experience of social breakdown and war, even as they laid the groundwork for his iconic postwar sculpture. Pursuing a concept of crisis as both an irreducible encounter with uncertainty and the clarification of a conflict, Fiduccia reimagines this fragmentary and inconspicuous body of work as the pivotal phase in the artist's career as well as a vital episode in the history of modern sculpture. This fresh account, told through the philosophical, political, and aesthetic thought of Giacometti's time, shows how ideologies of nationalism helped generate the problems of selfhood at the heart of modernism.

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