Alberto Giacometti

thumb|Alberto Giacometti by Jan Hladík, 2002 Alberto Giacometti (10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. 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 (1945), as cited in: Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub (1999), Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets. p. 302 Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction. Alberto Giacometti. Exhibition of sculptures, paintings, drawings. Pierre Matisse Gallery (New York, N.Y.), 1948. p. 36 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. Alberto Giacometti in: Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti. Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago [and others], distributed by Doubleday, 1965. p. 20 That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it. Alberto Giacometti in: James Lord (1965), Giacometti Portrait, p. 11-12; as cited in: James Olney (1998), Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. p. 331 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 in: Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti. Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago [and others], distributed by Doubleday, 1965. p. 26 thumb|Alberto Giacometti at the 31° Venice Biennale in 1962, photographed by Paolo Monti. 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 in: Paul Auster (trans.) "My life is reduced to nothing: David Sylvester talks to Alberto Giacometti about his struggle with proportion and the difficulties of making an eye," theguardian.com, 21 June 2003. Giacometti, 1985 Alberto Giacometti, quoted in: James Lord (1985), Giacometti: A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1986. Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. The others hang on and never let go. As cited in: Kay Larson, "The thin man," New York Magazine, 7 October 1985, p. 70 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. As cited in: Kay Larson, "The thin man," New York Magazine, 7 October 1985, p. 70 Quotes about Alberto Giacometti There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti. Ollie Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Stories (1994) 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 As quoted in Can Painting be Taught by Dorothy Seckler, Art News No. 50 (March 1951), p. 64 I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. .Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language. Robert Motherwell, in an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in 'Metro', 1962; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 82 What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Situations," in Braziller (1965): On Alberto Giacometti’s work External links Category:1901 births Category:1966 deaths Category:Sculptors Category:Painters from Switzerland Category:Printmakers