Alberto Giacometti

"In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession."

"Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction."

"There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement."

"That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it."

"And then the wish to make compositions with figures. For this I had to make (quickly I thought; in passing), one or two studies from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a head, of a whole figure, and in 1935 I took a model. This study should take, I thought, two weeks and then I could realize my compositions...I worked with the model all day from 1935 to 1940...Nothing was as I imagined. A head, became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions."

"A little after I started to do sculpture, I painted some of them, and then I destroyed them all. I've begun again several times. In 1951, I painted a whole series of sculptures. But in painting them, you see what the form lacks. And it's useless to paint over something that you don't believe in. I tried again a month ago. In painting them, the deficiencies of form came through."

"Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. The others hang on and never let go."

"One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene... The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space."

"I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. .Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language."

"What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space."