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
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.
That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and - instead of giving up - you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling - be it an illusion or not - that something new has opened up.
In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.
What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
The form is always the measure of the obsession.
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.
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
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.
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.
Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.
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.
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.