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.”
• “Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction.”
• “There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement.”
• “That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.”
• “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.”
• “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.”

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Wikidata facts

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Emmy Andriesse - Alberto Giacometti (Ende 1940er PK-F-A.06801) cut.jpg

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