Alberto Giacometti quotes

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession. (Alberto Giacometti)
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life. (Alberto Giacometti)
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it). View quote
Alberto Giacometti
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement. Despite all my efforts, it was impossible for me then to endure a sculpture that gave an illusion of movement, a leg advancing, a raised arm, a head looking sideways. I could only create such movement if it was real and actual. I also wanted to give the sensation of motion that could be induced. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
A little after I started to do sculpture, I painted some of them, and then I destroyed them all. I've begun again several times. In 1951, I painted a whole series of sculptures. But in painting them, you see what the form lacks. And it's useless to paint over something that you don't believe in. I tried again a month ago. In painting them, the deficiencies of form came through. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene... The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
And then the wish to make compositions with figures. For this I had to make (quickly I thought; in passing), one or two studies from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a head, of a whole figure, and in 1935 I took a model. This study should take, I thought, two weeks and then I could realize my compositions...I worked with the model all day from 1935 to 1940...Nothing was as I imagined. A head, became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray! (Alberto Giacometti)
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do. View quote
Alberto Giacometti