Quotes & Sayings About Giacometti

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see. — Alberto Giacometti

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today. — 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. — Alberto Giacometti

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. — Alberto Giacometti

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color? — Alberto Giacometti

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and - instead of giving up - you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling - be it an illusion or not - that something new has opened up. — Alberto Giacometti

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else. — Alberto Giacometti

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little. — Alberto Giacometti

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality ... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it. — John Berger

Yes, people do come across the street to say hi, but as they approach and get near, my perception of space begins to dissolve, and a new interest takes over that is primarily emotional, and with it comes a desire to touch, which may be a human interest, but not the interest of my work. — Diego Giacometti

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt. — David Markson

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss. — Alberto Giacometti

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me. — 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. — 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. — 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. — Alberto Giacometti

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse. — 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

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. — 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. — Alberto Giacometti

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it. — 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

When I make my drawings ... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness. — Alberto Giacometti

I'm sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb. — Jessi Klein

It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space. — Hans Hofmann

In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat. — Alberto Giacometti

I was inspired by the marvelous example of Giacometti, the great sculptor. He always said that his dream was to do a bust so small that it could enter a matchbook, but so heavy that no one could lift it. That's what a good book should be. — Elie Wiesel

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair. — Alberto Giacometti

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways. — Alberto Giacometti

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary ... So long as I've learned something about why. — Alberto Giacometti

All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life. — Alberto Giacometti

I started going to exhibitions in Switzerland when I was 10 or 11. As a schoolboy, I would go every afternoon to see the long, thin figures of Giacometti. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

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

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible. — Alberto Giacometti

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model. — Alberto Giacometti

When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn't care. — Alberto Giacometti

We see parts of each other, and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street, I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you, coming in and compressing you. — Diego 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

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. — Nicole Krauss

The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people and life itself is inside the skull. — 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

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality ... to protect myself. — Alberto Giacometti

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt. — 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. — Alberto Giacometti

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is. — Alberto Giacometti

The form is always the measure of the obsession. — Alberto Giacometti

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

Giacometti knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space, he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority. — Jean-Paul Sartre

(Art is) the residue of vision. — Alberto Giacometti

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve. — Alberto Giacometti