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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

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

Care Fashion Life Oneself Past Pieces Work
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

Care Failure Importance Live Problem Prostitution Yourself
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

Equality Failure Image Myself Success Willing
Art is the residue of vision.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Art One Liner Residue Vision
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Art Need People See Yourself
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Art Intensity Object Reality Reproduction
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

Artist Modeling Myself Person Possible Sculpture
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

Fact Myself Past People Talk Thinking
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Close Different Impossible Myself See
What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Happiness Impossible Myself Work
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Marvelous Myself Paint See
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

Confusion Distance Greatness Head Myself
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

Enthusiasm Expression Hard Oneself Vision
In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Animal Building Burning Choice Myself Save
That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Impossible Oneself Picture Terrible Work
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Myself Paint Protection Reality Sculpture
If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Drawing Master Possible Potential
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Disappoint Master Myself See
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

Beautiful Day Different Myself Work
I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Drawing Myself Time Understand
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Alone Finding Growth Myself Old
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

End Failure Learning Myself See Try
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

Age Contradict Identify Myself Remain
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

Art Civilization Life Memories Myself Past Replacement Rise Space Work
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

Escape Face Human Oneself Strange Unknown
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

Appearance Darkness Drawing Man Myself Path
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

Color Myself Reproduction See

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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