On February 3rd 2010, a new world record was broken. In the art world, a work by Giacometti, "L’homme qui marche I", has been sold at 65 million pounds, the most expensive work of art ever sold in an auction house. Part of this huge pricing is based on the quality of the artist and the subjects his works of art approaches.
I assume that the cost of this work was highly evaluated (estimated sales price of 12-18million pounds) because of the artist’s popularity, the appealing aesthetic and because of the rareness of the work. In fact, Giacometti did only six other works like these. It was a series meant to decorate the park of the New York bank Chase. The sculpture’s aesthetic is quite interesting because of its 6ft dimension and its slim format, but also because it has an eerie aura. There is something quite strong about this work in its representation of mankind with a new way of seeing space, but also the human being itself. Giacometti would sculpt his subjects very thin, even fragile, because he sought to create sculptures that were themselves and not blocky spatial representations of someone; for him this didn’t represent a person since it only gave an image of its physical appearance. He wanted to create sculptures that represented someone’s inner being, the part that really means who you are, its soul. For this, Giacometti would strip his sculptures bare of any physical trait, of anything that might make a resemblance to anyone possible. It is taking of the shell in order to find the nut.
He will try to depart himself from the traditional sculpture who will try to imitate its model onto the object as perfectly as possible by giving it all the likeness he can achieve. Giacometti criticized these copies as saying that it was copying what was known and not what was really seen. He often said himself that he made his sculptures so, in the objective that you could not recognize who was represented. Jean-Paul Sartre, who would write a lot about Giacometti, once wrote that ‘to sculpt, for him (Giacometti), is to take the fat of the space’ (Lynton, p.218). Giacometti’s walking men present the human being on a new perspective but also with new preoccupations, that one of death. The Egyptians, from who Giacometti was greatly influenced, thought that these vague and ethereal sculptures would help them keep something from death, not the body, but a remembrance of the person’s real self, its soul.
These ‘people’ are truly intriguing, giving the sense that someone could stare at them for hours, commenting on how they look like humans, yet being so different. Tough we can not identify anyone in particular, we know that somewhere in that sculpture, there is something to which we can relate and identify ourselves to him, just as we do to any other human being. I would say this is the most human sculpture I’ve seen much more than Michelangelo’s David or any other Greek sculpture even if it looks so different to one. Though, is this a reason to give so much money away for it? I guess this huge event proves that art is much more than just a price on a product, it has something else to it, it provoques and interests you. It has a certain soul of itself. That is the main difference why a t-shirt is 30$ and a sculpture of this magnitude is a few million pounds.
This video gives you a closer look at the work
This other video, gives you a broader sense of his particular style of sculpting.
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