Alberto Giacometti has long been recognized as one of the most original artists of the last century, producing not just the sculptures for which he is best known, but also remarkable paintings, drawings, and lithographs. Yves Bonnefoy's groundbreaking monograph, first published in 1991, reveals the psychological and intellectural context of Giacometti's artistic output, while at the same time providing key interpretations of individual works. Available for the first time in paperback, this richly illustrated, scholarly study remains a seminal work on the artist and his era, raising issues central to the understanding of twentieth-century art as a whole.

Born in Tours in 1923, Yves Bonnefoy graduated in history of science and philosophy. He is first and foremost, however, a writer, and has devoted himself primarily to the analysis of poetry and art. He published his first volume of poems, Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, in 1953. He has also written numerous essays, including Rome 1630, L'Improbable, L'Arrière-pays and Entretiens su la poésie, and has translated Shakespeare and Yeats into French. Many of his poetic works have been translated into English (In the Shadow's Light, 1990; New and Selected Poems, 1996) along with a number of his essays (The Act and the Place of Poetry, 1989; The Lure and Truth of Painting, 1995), all published by the University of Chicago Press. He was awarded the Prix Montaigne in 1978 and the Bennett Award in New York in 1988. He has been invited to teach at numerous American universities, among them Yale, Princeton, the University of California and City University, New York. He was elected in 1981 to a Chair of Comparative Poetry at the Collège de France, and is a doctor honoris causa at various universities, including the University of Chicago.