Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacomettiwas a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia, as the eldest of four children to Giovanni Giacometti, a well-known post-Impressionist painter. Coming from an artistic background, he was interested in art from an early age...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth10 October 1901
CityBorgonovo, Switzerland
CountrySwitzerland
(Art is) the residue of vision.
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.
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.
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.
In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.
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.
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.