Mythic Giacometti

Lord's 1985 biography of the Italian artist Alberto Giacometti was, in his own words,""a monument dedicated to honor and perpetuate the memory, aspirations and achievements of a legendary hero."" This little book, offered as a kind of coda, retells the story of the sculptor's life as a sequence of critical moments that evoke the Oedipus story, and suggests that Giacometti had a mythic destiny, from his birth and baptism through to the demise of his father, whose funeral Giacometti was too ill to attend. Certainly his was a fraught life: the artist had an erotic obsession with feet and a ferocious attachment to his mother. On two occasions, he awoke to the unexpected company of a dead body. Lord's exegetical treatment of these and other events, though by no means groundless, is often labored and oddly evasive, as when he advances the possibility that an early encounter with an older man was sexual. Lord presents his speculations with tortuous and unmistakably compassionate logic, yet he does not pursue the meaning or consequences of the episode. His writing has the strength of conviction, but the prose often becomes lumpy with qualification and abstraction. At 80, Lord belongs to a generation that arguably prefers to discuss art and life in terms of principle and paradigm rather than emotion or history. By pursuing his Freudian theme in isolation from the larger scope of biography, he reveals more about his own stake in the artist's life than he does about his subject or his work. Which is perhaps as he meant it to be.