He had a need, and talent, for friendship Peppiatt explores his fascination with the “night creatures” frequenting the bars and brothels surrounding his proverbially squalid studio near Montparnasse, and the quietly unshakeable bond he shared with Diego, who worked as his studio assistant, sat for him most days and made the lamps and other high-end objets d’art with which the brothers kept the pot boiling during the cash-strapped 1930s.

The human side of Giacometti’s life is not neglected, from his remorseless self-criticism and outright self-sabotaging to his sometimes complicated love life – a fair amount of self-sabotaging went on there, too, though he did manage a brief tryst with Marlene Dietrich. Fail better” – to illustrate Giacometti’s abiding conviction that the task he applied himself to for most of his career was not just ineffable, but essentially impossible.)

(Peppiatt cites Beckett’s famous line from Worstward Ho! – “Ever tried. If art wasn’t just an ape of nature, then what was it? How could a work of art be representative “of” something, whether that something was an abstract concept or your brother Diego’s nose, say, and still have any sort of real identity in itself? Peppiatt notes his adroit use of new media (photography, magazines) to promote both his work and his personal “brand”, and his close relationships with writers including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Genet and Beckett. Michael Peppiatt’s elegant, authoritative biography is extremely strong on the artist’s intellectual context – his early dalliance with Surrealism, his deep interest in philosophy and the agonising challenges facing any sort of “modern” artist. The first duty of any new book on Giacometti might therefore be to help us see him afresh. His spindly, knobbly sculptures, fragile but somehow fierce, and his dust-coloured, scrabbled-at paintings fizz with quiet originality and crackle with sublimated energy but in their anguished and eternally unfinished state they seem so redolent of their time – a spoonful of post-war angst, a dash of existentialism – that it’s all too easy to think, okay, I get the picture, and waft on. Waft through any major collection of modern art and you’ll doubtless encounter a few works by Alberto Giacometti, around half-way along the 20th century, after the Cubists and Surrealists and before the big Americans.

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