A Giacometti Portrait

James Lord's A Giacometti Portrait is a day-by-day account of sitting for Alberto Giacometti in Paris in 1964, and a record of how a single painting was begun, reworked and left unfinished.

Lord expected one or two sittings. The portrait took eighteen consecutive afternoons in September and October 1964. He transcribed Giacometti's remarks during the sessions and photographed the canvas at the end of each day, so the text follows the painting through its repeated revisions. The book first appeared in 1965. This is the Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback of 1980, 117 pages.

Lord (1922 to 2009) was an American writer from Englewood, New Jersey, who settled in Paris after serving in the US Army in the Second World War. He later wrote Giacometti: A Biography (1985) and Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir (1993), and the 2017 film Final Portrait, with Armie Hammer as Lord, retells the sittings.