Even during his own lifetime Alberto Giacometti had already become a legendary figure due to the sheer amount that was written about him. His rich oeuvre, which set completely new standards in art, fascinated his contemporaries; his life - with all its different refractions - gripped them. This publication, with a wealth of illustrations, texts, conversations, diary entries, letters, interviews and quotes, draws a many-layered picture of Giacometti as a human being. His life is portrayed through his own statements and in reports by those who shared his life - including family members, fellow pupils and students, artist-friends such as Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Hans Arp and Salvador Dalí, writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, collectors and gallerists such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Peggy Guggenheim: short commentaries accompany these sources which range right from his earliest days in the Bregaglia through to the fifties and sixties. The image that forms in the mirror held up by these biographical documents - with all their many contradictions - is without doubt the liveliest possible portrait of Alberto Giacometti. (German edition available ISBN 3-7757-0752-2) The editor: Reinhold Hohl, born 1939. Studied literature and the history of music at the Sorbonne in Paris. Doctoral thesis in art history at the University of Basel. 1972-1976 Professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. 1983-1991 Conservator of the print collection at the Technische Hochschule in Zürich. Honorary professor at the Technische Hochschule in Zürich. Working with the Saarländischer Rundfunk and Swiss Television. Numerous publications on art in the 20th century. Since 1959 Reinhold Hohl has devoted numerous publications, exhibition catalogues, essays and newspaper articles to the work of Alberto Giacometti.