James Lord came to Paris as a soldier during World War II. He presented himself at Picasso's home and was invited inside. Lord became part of Picasso's circle and met the painter Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress. This book tells of Lord's relationship with them and of Picasso and Dora's relationship.
When we look at a painting hanging on an art gallery wall, we see only what the artist has chosen to disclose--the finished work of art. What remains mysterious is the process of creation itself--the making of the work of art. Everyone who has looked at paintings has wondered about this, and numerous efforts have been made to discover and depict the creative method of important artists. A Giacometti Portrait is a picture of one of the century's greatest artists at work.James Lord sat for eighteen days while his friend Alberto Giamcometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in its various stages. What emerged was an illumination of what it is to be an artist and what it was to be Giacometti--a portrait in prose of the man and his art. A work of great literary distinction, A Giacometti Portrait is, above all, a subtle and important evocation of a great artist.
James Lord's elegant, moving book is the first to show the private Dora Maar. PICASSO & DORA sheds new light both on the greatest of modern artists, and on the most important and most mysterious of his loves.
The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. He was also--as James Lord persuasively argued in A Biography --a heroic figure whose vocation sustained him through a life of crippling anxiety and erotic guilt.Almost twenty years after it first appeared, Giacometti has attained the status of a classic, one of the most candid and complete biographies of an artist in our time. In Mythic Giacometti , Lord reveals the hidden "blueprint" of that a daringly literal, visionary interpretation of the myth of Oedipus as it affected the conduct and outcome of Giacometti's life. The result is a case study both in the development of an artist and in the writing of biography. Lord concentrates on the private totems of Giacometti's life-family legend, childhood memory,illness and injury, crucial sexual encounters, intimations of mortality-that amounted, in Lord's view, to signs of a tragic destiny directly linked to the central tragedy of Western literature.
