Top 8 Alberto Giacometti Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement.

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

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.