L'Homme qui marche I.

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Back of the pattern of a 100-franc banknote with four images of the plastic from different perspectives

L'Homme qui marche I ( German : The striding man I ) is a life-size sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti , which is available in six bronze casts and four artist's copies. It was created in 1960. According to art historians, it is “one of the most important works” by Giacometti; at the same time it is one of the most important works of Swiss art of the 20th century.

For the 8th banknote series in Switzerland, the 100- franc note issued in 1998 was designed in honor of Alberto Giacometti; the front contains a portrait of the artist, and the reverse shows his sculpture L'Homme qui marche I in four different perspectives , along with two other works .

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Work context

After turning away from Surrealism around 1935, Alberto Giacometti returned to the representational in his portraits and sculptures; According to his own statement, the artist wanted to “work according to nature again […].” During the war years, most of which he spent in Geneva , he created sculptures of minimal size, often only a few centimeters high. Giacometti tried to model people close to him as he remembered them after encounters. He made the sculpture very small to reflect the distance at which he had seen the model. According to a formulation by the art historian Dieter Honisch , Giacometti wanted to bring his "subjective viewing experience into the appropriate form". However, the artist gradually saw this development as a dead end: “Inexorably, all my figures shrank to a height of one centimeter. Another pressure with your thumb and go! - no more figure. "

In the first post-war years, he made drawings and sculptures that reveal the opposite strategy. The figures, such as the pencil drawings Figures sur une place (1947), Grande figure d'atelier (1948) and the oil drawing L'Homme qui marche (1950), were now characterized by excessively long limbs . At the same time, the new proportions of the figures also took place in the sculptures, for example in the elongated, 202 cm high Grande figure from 1947. Although Giacometti strengthened the physical presence of his figures, they retained the characteristic of distance: “[…] by when he fetched the smaller figures from across the street, they brought with them their distance, their disembodiment, their weightlessness. Instead of the size of a thumb, they were now thin as a thread. ”For him, reality was not exhausted in its manifestations, not in the“ appearance of the visible world ”. Giacometti set himself the task of penetrating beyond the realm of the visible and grasping the “essence” of things as it was communicated to his individual vision.

Description and interpretation

Among the life-size and larger-than-life figures, the Striding Men, which he completed in 1960 in two different versions (L'Homme qui marche I and L'Homme qui marche II) , have been described as the “quintessence of Giacometti's sculptural work”. Of L'Homme qui marche I was in 1961 a series of six bronze castings and four artist's proofs made. In the approximately 183 cm high sculpture, Giacometti takes the amorphous , almost shapeless of the miniature figures one step further. The emaciated body is spindly, especially at the waist; the extra-long legs and arms reach a circumference of only a few centimeters. Compared to the other body proportions, the hands and the feet standing on a pedestal (95.5 cm long and 26 cm wide) appear oversized and massive. The wide stride position, “like a hieroglyph without bending the knees”, gives the figure its own dynamic, which is broken by a stiff, empty gaze. The genitals and face, in particular the eye sockets, eyebrows and lips, are only hinted at and reveal the touch of the fingers in the moist tone . Eye-catching hills and hollows emphasize the traces of the creation process and do not reflect specific details of the designed figure. The decidedly rough modeled surface creates a richly differentiated play of shadows under different lighting conditions, which indicates the changing nature of reality and underlines the man's "nervous energy", which activates and charges the space around him. Giacometti covered some of the six bronze casts with ocher yellow and ink black paint, others remained untreated after the casting process.

L'Homme qui marche I has been interpreted very differently. The Giacometti biographer James Lord conveyed the "jagged" but gnarled limbs with their wide stride "a power potential, an original urge to act and the physical energy of masculinity." The man knew exactly where he was going, "for what purpose and." for what purpose. ”However, this interpretation has not been able to prevail. Likewise, an identification of Giacometti's post-war art with the existentialism of the French post-war years is rejected today , according to which the striding man, like Giacometti's late sculptural work in general, symbolized the fateful surrender of modern man to reality, which was necessarily alien to him.

Today, the tension between the “high posture, the fragile towering” and the amorphous materiality, which corresponds to the “human condition between dignity, exposure and ultimately frailty”, is emphasized. The "cracked open figures of Giacometti" never let their origins in clay and earth be forgotten, which is why, despite a certain distance and remoteness, they remain "precariously attached to transience, the base and the human". The striding man is "always searching for further strides, as Giacometti understood himself in his creative endeavors." According to Wieland Schmied , the "traces of wrestling" appeared to the artist as confirmation of his credibility. “They make it clear that the picture was wrested from reality in the full sense of the word, torn from it. They are the seal of his authenticity. "

Emergence

The sculpture L'Homme qui marche I was created when Giacometti and his American colleague Alexander Calder were invited in 1956 to design the newly created area in front of the skyscraper of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York that was under construction . At this point in time, Giacometti had been hoping for more than 25 years to receive the commission for a public “square sculpture”. In the post-war years, initial considerations around 1930 resulted in compositions with figures who meet in a square. The architect of the bank building, Gordon Bunshaft , suggested to Giacometti that his group of figures Trois hommes qui marchent (1948), which, together with its base, was only 64.2 centimeters high, to ten meters (according to another representation, to 18 meters) . However, he did not like this plan, not least the proportions. The men could not agree on a common project, so the contract was broken.

Giacometti subsequently worked on four larger-than-life standing women (Femme debout I – IV, also: Grande Femme debout I – IV) , still based on the idea of ​​a square . He supplemented these 2.70 and 2.78 meter high figures with the two versions of the life-size, striding men (L'Homme qui marche I and L'Homme qui marche II) and two versions of the sculpture Big Head (Grande tête I – II ) . He completed the various clay models by April 1960. Although initially conceived as a group composition, the individual figures were later exhibited separately. L'Homme qui marche I was first presented to the public in 1962 at the Venice Biennale .

The bronze cast of L'Homme qui marche I was made in 1961 in the Art Foundry Susse Fondeur in Paris. The dimensions of the various casts mentioned in literature as well as by art museums and the art trade differ slightly in the range of up to about one centimeter, which is due to production and measurement technology. The dimensions of the first copy with the serial number 1/6 are: height = 182  cm , length = 97 cm, width = 27 cm. For the second copy with the serial number 2/6 these are: H = 183 cm, L = 95.5 cm, W = 26 cm.

The individual copies are each marked on the base with the signature of the artist - the handwritten signature Alberto Giacometti - as well as with the serial number  1/6 to  6/6 and the foundry stamp Susse Fondeur Paris .

Copies and owners

The bronze cast with the serial number 2/6 was initially acquired by Aimé Maeght for his gallery. This cast was then in the possession of the gallery owner Sidney Janis and several private individuals in the United States . In 1980 bought Manfred Meier-Preschany the statue at a cost of 750,000 US dollars for the art collection of Dresdner Bank . The "Striding Man" was set up in the boardroom of Dresdner Bank in the 31-storey silver tower in Frankfurt, where it was not open to the public. However, the sculpture was loaned out for exhibitions, including in 1994 in the Frankfurt Jahrhunderthalle and in 1998 in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. With the takeover of Dresdner Bank by Commerzbank in 2009, the bronze sculpture passed into their ownership. This announced their sale in January 2010.

At the auction on February 3, 2010 at the Sotheby’s auction house , L'Homme qui marche I fetched 65,001,250 pounds sterling (104,327,006 US dollars, 74.4 million euros or around 110 million Swiss francs ), the highest ever for one Auction price for a work of art. The bronze casting lost this record again in May 2010, when the Picasso work Nude with Green Leaves and Bust was auctioned at an art auction in New York for 106.4 million dollars (around 82 million euros). In March 2010 Bloomberg LP reported that the new owner of the Giacometti sculpture was Lily Safra (* 1938 in Porto Alegre ), the widow Edmond Safras .

Six other casts of the sculpture are in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (serial number 1/6), in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo , in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran , in the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de- Vence , at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and in the holdings of the Alberto et Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris. Three casts are part of private collections.

literature

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ Christian Klemm: Alberto Giacometti 1901–1966 . In: Christian Klemm, Carolyn Lanchner u. a .: Alberto Giacometti , Berlin 2001, p. 232
  2. ↑ See e.g. E.g. Erwin Dettling: A proud price for excess lengths . swissinfo (www.swissinfo.ch), February 5, 2010, accessed on February 8, 2010.
  3. ↑ See e.g. E.g .: Tobias Timm: bronze trade. Commerzbank is auctioning a famous sculpture by Alberto Giacometti in London In: Die Zeit , No. 04 of January 21, 2010, accessed on February 8, 2010
  4. ↑ See e.g. E.g .: Giacometti sculpture fetches £ 65m at Sotheby's auction . BBC News , February 5, 2010, accessed February 7, 2010
  5. ↑ Swiss National Bank - The design of the current banknote series ( Memento from January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Quoted from Reinhold Hohl : Alberto Giacometti , Stuttgart 1971, p. 251
  7. ↑ See Reinhold Hohl, p. 206
  8. ↑ Dieter Honisch: Big and small with Giacometti . In: Angela Schneider (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti , Berlin 1987, pp. 99–105, here: p. 99
  9. ↑ Quoted from Reinhold Hohl, p. 274
  10. ↑ James Lord Collection. The drawing, 68 × 51 cm, oil on chamois-colored paper, bears a dedication from Giacometti to James Lord: "A James Lord en souvenir de sa visite à Stampa, le 6 août, 1964, très affectueusement, Alberto Gicometti". In: James Lord: Alberto Giacometti Drawings . A Paul Bianchini Book, Lausanne 1971; New York Graphic Society Ltd., Greenwich, Connecticut 1971, p. 139
  11. ↑ Wieland Schmied: Shadows from Another World. Alberto Giacometti and his picture of reality . In: Rudolf Koella (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti , Munich 1997, pp. 39–53, here: p. 45
  12. ↑ Wieland Schmied, p. 44
  13. ^ Jean-Louis Prat: Giacometti in the Fondation Maeght . In: Rudolf Koella (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti , Munich 1997, pp. 55–57, here: p. 55
  14. ↑ a b c Sotheby’s - auction data from February 3, 2010 (accessed October 5, 2011)
  15. ↑ Nicholas Watkins (ed.): Behind the mirror: Aimé Maeght and his artists: Bonnard, Matisse, Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque . Royal Academy of Arts, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-905711-38-3 , p. 130. (English, exhibition catalog)
  16. ↑ Reinhold Hohl, Giacometti and his century . In: Angela Schneider (Ed.), Alberto Giacometti. Sculptures, paintings, drawings , Munich a. a. 2008, pp. 45–51, here: p. 49
  17. ↑ Valerie J. Fletcher, Silvio Berthoud: Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 , London 1988, p. 218
  18. ↑ Wieland Schmied, p. 47 f.
  19. ↑ Valerie J. Fletcher, p. 218
  20. ↑ Jean-Louis Prat, p. 56 f.
  21. ↑ James Lord: Alberto Giacometti. The human being and his life's work , Bern 1987, p. 369
  22. ↑ On the rejection of the existentialism thesis cf. Gudrun Inboden: The face of the room. Observations on the mature work of Alberto Giacometti . In: Angela Schneider (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti , Berlin 1987, pp. 87–97 here: p. 87; Wieland Schmied, p. 39
  23. ↑ Christian Klemm, p. 150
  24. ↑ Wieland Schmied, p. 50
  25. ↑ See Reinhold Hohl, p. 282
  26. ↑ Angela Schneider (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti , Berlin 1987, p. 40 f.
  27. ↑ Christie's - auction dates for “Grande femme debout II” from 1994
  28. ↑ Dieter Honisch, p. 101
  29. ^ A b Carnegie Museum of Art
  30. ↑ See e.g. E.g .: Nicholas Watkins (ed.): Behind the mirror: Aimé Maeght and his artists: Bonnard, Matisse, Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque . Royal Academy of Arts, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-905711-38-3 , p. 130. (English, exhibition catalog)
  31. ↑ Manfred Meier-Preschany in an interview with Rüdiger Jungbluth: Without a doubt, my best business. Manfred Meier-Preschany bought Giacometti's »Schreitenden« as a member of the board in 1980. Now the sculpture brought in a record price. In: Die Zeit , No. 07 of February 11, 2010, p. 28.
  32. ↑ a b Commerzbank soon without Giacometti - The shadow of the thin man , Frankfurter Allgemeine, January 8, 2010
  33. ↑ The converted value is based on information from the auction house, which used the highest conversion rate on February 3, 2010, £ 1 = US $ 1.605.
  34. ↑ Sotheby's - Thin Bronze Man for 74 million euros ( Memento from February 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  35. ↑ $ 106,482,500 for a Picasso ( Memento of May 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  36. ↑ Johannes Wilms: The Rich Widow ( Memento from October 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from March 4, 2010, p. 10
  37. ↑ Andrea Graf: Lily Safra: Buyer of Giacometti's sculpture ( Memento from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: art - Das Kunstmagazin online from March 1, 2010
  38. ↑ Markus Brüderlin, Toni Stoos (Ed.): Alberto Giacometti - The origin of space. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7757-2714-3 , pp. 129, 251; Giacometti bouleverse le marché de l'art Le Figaro, February 11, 2010
  39. ↑ Places the figure in a larger cultural and historical context.