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Alberto Giacometti´s 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist´s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional - a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist´s surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti´s aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait - or what Didi-Huberman terms "abstract anthropomorphism." Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others whom Giacometti counted as influences, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti´s art with a new approach to transitional work.

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9 - 10 Note (Georges Didi-Huberman)11 - 14 Buried Face (Georges Didi-Huberman)15 - 23 Face of the Orientation that Cannot Be Found (Georges Didi-Huberman)25 - 35 Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Volume (Georges Didi-Huberman)37 - 41 Face of the Cage and the Transparent Crystal (Georges Didi-Huberman)43 - 48 Face of the Bodies that Come Apart (Georges Didi-Huberman)49 - 62 Face of the Impossible Dimension (Georges Didi-Huberman)63 - 85 Face of the Dead Heads (Georges Didi-Huberman)87 - 101 Lost Face, Face of the Father (Georges Didi-Huberman)103 - 121 Face of Opacity and the Blind Crystal (Georges Didi-Huberman)123 - 131 Face of Shadow and Spacing (Georges Didi-Huberman)133 - 136 Melancholic Face (Georges Didi-Huberman)137 - 145 Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Notch (Georges Didi-Huberman)147 - 156 Face for Finishing with the Object (Georges Didi-Huberman)157 - 198 Buried Face (Georges Didi-Huberman)199 - 224 Notes225 - 245 In the Face of the Unface (Mira Fliescher, Elena Vogman)247 Credits

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"A spiral-shaped investigation of Giacometti´s work revolving around various readings of one of his sculptures ... Didi-Huberman exploits the formal presence of Cube to construct a metaphoric and polyphonic interplay of critical facets which allows him to engage with a range of Giacometti´s aesthetical investigations." Timothy Mathews, excerpt from Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation.

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