Michael Peppiatt

Today, the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. It was Paris that made him, and he in turn immortalised a certain Paris through his art.

Arriving from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with remarkable artists and writers - from Picasso, Breton and Dalí to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett - but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city's unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the café-terraces buzzing with radical ideas and racy gossip.

In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt –who spent thirty years documenting the Paris art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew – charts the course of the artist's life and work. Peppiatt begins with an intimate story of trying – and failing – to meet Giacometti, and offers an new portrait of an outstanding artist in exceptional times: From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships and losses, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage. This is Giacometti in Paris.

Michael Peppiatt is an art historian, curator and author. In an international career spent between London, Paris and New York, Peppiatt has written regularly for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News and Art International magazine, which he re-launched as its new publisher and editor from Paris in 1985. He is the author of over twenty books including the definitive Bacon biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised edition 2008). Peppiatt has also curated numerous exhibitions worldwide, and he is currently at work on a major retrospective contrasting the achievements of the two modern artists he most admires: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.