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
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
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.
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.
Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.
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.
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?
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.
I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!
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.
Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.
Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.