Why Alberto Giacometti’s lone bronze walker became a record-breaking icon of modern art
In short: In 1961, Alberto Giacometti cast a life-size bronze figure of a man in mid-stride. Decades later, this humble, elongated sculpture transformed into a financial titan, shattering auction records and redefining the market for modern art. It remains a potent symbol of human life force and the pinnacle of artistic experimentation.
L'Homme qui marche I, or The Walking Man I, emerged from a period of intense creative struggle. In 1960, Giacometti was commissioned to create bronze figures for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, but he ultimately abandoned the project. Despite this frustration, he successfully cast the life-size sculpture in 1961, exhibiting it at the Venice Biennale the following year. The work features a lone, thin figure with arms hanging at his sides, capturing what Giacometti described as the natural equilibrium of a stride—a physical manifestation of the human life force.
The sculpture’s journey into the record books began on 3 February 2010, at a Sotheby’s auction in London. Commerzbank, which had acquired the piece after absorbing Dresdner Bank in 2009, put the second edition of the sculpture up for sale. Estimated to fetch between £12 and £18 million, the work ignited a bidding war that concluded in just eight minutes. Lily Safra, widow of the banker Edmond Safra, secured the piece for £65 million, including the buyer's premium, equivalent to $104.3 million at the time.
This sale was a watershed moment for the art market. It eclipsed the previous record for a sculpture sold at public auction, held by the 5,000-year-old Guennol Lioness, and surpassed the record for a Giacometti work previously set by Grande Femme Debout II in 2008. While other works like Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe had set high benchmarks, the sale of L'Homme qui marche I cemented its status as an iconic image of modern art. Today, various editions of the work are housed in prestigious institutions, including the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Fondation Maeght, ensuring its legacy as a definitive exploration of the human form.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: L'Homme qui marche I
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