“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 (1901-1966) uttered these words shortly before his death. A giant of twentieth-century art, Giacometti stands beside Picasso and Matisse as an artist who has defined the way art is perceived and alongside them as one of the few modern artists who have created sculpture, paintings and drawings with equal mastery. Yet, Giacometti remains as the least recognized of the great artists of the twentieth-century.
His personal life has remained a subject of continuing fascination. For Giacometti, life and art embodied and expressed a persistent struggle. His was an art of construction and deconstruction: of reworking, erasing, decomposing and rebuilding.
With the recent centennial retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, generations young and old today are rediscovering this great man who many considered as the truest of all artists.
