Alberto Giacometti Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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.

Alberto Giacometti
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

Alberto Giacometti
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

Alberto Giacometti
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. The others hang on and never let go.

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.

Alberto Giacometti
Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction.

Alberto Giacometti
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
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.

Alberto Giacometti
Picasso is altogether bad, completely beside the point from the beginning except for Cubist period and even that half misunderstood…. Ugly. Old-fashioned vulgar without sensitivity, horrible in color or non-color. Very bad painter once and for all.

Alberto Giacometti
Picasso is certainly very gifted, but his works are only objects. [...] That is why - without pursuing a single course of work to develop it - Picasso constantly change his course. There is no progress in the world of objects. It is a closed world.

Alberto Giacometti
The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

Alberto Giacometti
If the glass there in front of me astounds me more than all the glasses I've seen in painting, and if I even think that the greatest architectural wonder of the world couldn't affect me more than this glass, it's really not worth while going to the Indies to see some temple or other when I have as much and more right in front of me.

Alberto Giacometti