Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss artist born in 1901, made significant contributions to sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Initially associated with Surrealism, he later developed a distinct style focusing on the human figure, often depicted in elongated and slender forms that convey a sense of isolation and existential angst. Moving to Paris in the 1920s, Giacometti became renowned for his sculptures, characterized by their hauntingly thin and elongated figures, capturing the essence of human existence. His paintings and drawings similarly explore themes of solitude and the human condition, often portraying solitary figures in barren landscapes. Despite evolving stylistically over his career, Giacometti’s fascination with the human form remained central to his work. His innovative approach and profound exploration of existential themes earned him widespread acclaim, establishing him as one of the foremost sculptors of the 20th century. Giacometti’s legacy endures through his groundbreaking art, inspiring generations of artists and captivating viewers with its timeless exploration of the human experience. He passed away in 1966, leaving behind a lasting impact on the art world.

Alberto Giacometti Quotes

1. “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.”
— Alberto Giacometti

2. “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
— Alberto Giacometti

3. “In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.”
— Alberto Giacometti

4. “In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.”
— Alberto Giacometti

5. “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

6. “That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.”
— Alberto Giacometti

7. “Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.”
— Alberto Giacometti

8. “The form is always the measure of the obsession.”
— Alberto Giacometti

9. “The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.”
— Alberto Giacometti

10. “If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.”
— Alberto Giacometti

11. “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

12. “It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.”
— Alberto Giacometti

13. “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

14. “Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.”
— Alberto Giacometti

15. “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

16. “I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.”
— Alberto Giacometti

17. “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

18. “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.”
— Alberto Giacometti

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.”
— Alberto Giacometti

24. “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

25. “What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.”
— Alberto Giacometti

26. “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!”
— Alberto Giacometti

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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.”
— Alberto Giacometti

31. “If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.”
— Alberto Giacometti

32. “It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.”
— Alberto Giacometti