Buy Art - Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti 1901 - 1966

Annette in the studio

One day when I was drawing a young girl I suddenly noticed that the only thing!! that was alive was her gaze. The rest of her head. . . meant no more to me than the skull of a dead man. . . . One does want to sculpt a living person, but what makes him alive is without a doubt his gaze. The heads from the New Hebrides are true, are more than true, because they have a gaze. Not the imitation of eyes, but really and truly a gaze. Everything else is only the framework for the gaze. . . . If the gaze, that is, life, is the main thing, then the head becomes the main thing. . . the rest of the body is limited to functioning as antennae that make people's life possible-the life that is housed in the skull. . . . At a certain point in time I began to see the people in the street as if their living essence was very tiny. I saw living beings exclusively through their eyes.(1951)

The Palace at 4AM

The Nose, 1947

If one sets one's heart on grasping as much as possible of what one sees, be it in science or art, the procedure is the same. The scholar specialized in any field will find that the more he knows, the more he will have to learn, and never should he hope to reach full knowledge. Besides, full knowledge would be death itself. Art and science mean trying to understand. Failure or success plays a secondary role. This adventure is of recent date-it started approximately in the eighteenth century with Chardin, when one began to be interested more in the artist's vision than in serving the church or giving pleasure to kings. At last, man given to himself! One could not express in words what one feels with one's eyes and one's hand. Words pervert thoughts, writing distorts words-one no longer recognizes oneself. I do not believe in the problem of space; space is created solely by the objects; an object that moves without any relation to another object could not give the impression of space. The subject alone is decisive. The only important thing is to create a new object which conveys an impression as close as possible to that received when contemplating the subject. . . . Sculpture rests in the void. One hollows out space so as to construct the object, and the object as such creates space, the space that exists between the subject and the sculptor.(1962)

The Dog, 1951

It might be supposed that realism consists in copying a glass as it is on the table. In fact, one never copies anything but the vision that remains of it at each moment, the image that becomes conscious. You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision. . . . Each time I look at the glass, it has an air of remaking itself, that's to say, its reality becomes uncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. One sees it as if it were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing, coming into view again-that's to say, it really always is between being and not being. And it's this that one wants to copy. (c. 1963-1964)

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