Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alberto Giacometti
Age: 64 †
Born: 1901
Born: October 10
Died: 1966
Died: January 11
Artist
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Jewelry Designer
Painter
Printmaker
Sculptor
Writer
Alberṭo Gʼaḳomeṭi
Whether
Proportion
Artist
Measure
Art
Sign
Form
Subject
Work
Subjects
Primordial
Every
Terrible
Formal
Always
Impossible
Obsession
Quality
Qualities

More quotes by Alberto Giacometti

Image
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
Image
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
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
Image
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
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
Image
(Art is) the residue of vision.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
The form is always the measure of the obsession.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
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
Image
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.
Alberto Giacometti
Image
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
Image
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