His sculpture, like himself, is ＂strange＂ and difficult to ponder - it is the top of the sculptures

 Auction Information     |      未知    |    2023-06-15 18:05

In the 1930s, there lived a strange man in the Montparnasse block on the left bank of Paris.
 
He creates works every day and personally destroys them at night. Sometimes, he would accumulate sculptures full of carts and dump them into the Seine River.
 
This weird "self destruction procedure", like some kind of Performance art, made him a little famous in the art circle of Paris - the master photographer Bresson, the painter Picasso, and the writer Beckett all began to get to know and associate with him.
He is the Swiss existentialist sculptor Alberto Giacometti.


This name may seem unfamiliar, but his sculptures are highly iconic: tall and slender humanoid sculptures maintain a standing and walking posture, overly slender limbs seem weak, but there is a pair of steel and copper bones that make him stand.

The Walking Man
 
Lonely, thin, noble, full of trembling poetry.
 
His sculptures never follow the knowledge of anatomy and structure advocated by Rodin and Budel, and fight against the theoretical knowledge of traditional sculpture with uncoordinated eyes and hands. Although sculpture, like his people, is as bizarre and difficult to contemplate, it has repeatedly broken transaction records in the art market, reaching the title of the most expensive sculpture in history:
 
In 2010, Giacometti's "Walking Man" was sold for $104.3 million;
 
In 2014, Giacometti's "Chariot" broke the hundred million mark again;
 
In 2015, Giacometti's "The Demonstrator" hit the jackpot with a skyrocketing price of $141 million, becoming the highest in history.
 
The Instructor

The works that finally won the honor have the meaning of "one will become famous and ten thousand bones will wither" - think of those sculpture companions who were abandoned in the Seine River.
 
Giacometti was never satisfied with his work and has always been so.
 
In Paris in the 1930s, he joined the surreal school and achieved success. But he broke with it later, because Surrealism is all out of fantasy and absurd daydreams, rather than the real scenery observed by the eyes.
 
He does not want to see the world with the eyes of his predecessors, but rather wants to use his own eyes to present what he sees - that is not a depiction of the real thing, but a depiction of what he observes, incorporating his perception of the state of time and space, and even incorporating the weight of air.


Giacometti created a human body from the void and told people: 'This is my vision, hearing, and feeling.'.
 
This sculpture has nowhere to rely on, only a solid base under its feet. This base is Giacometti's determination to carry out his way of watching.
 
In the flashy Paris, various art genres compete to emerge, and people are caught by novelty, but no one cares about how a strange person makes the void appear and creates their own universe.

Until the outbreak of World War II.
In the era of war and chaos, Giacometti, like others, was shrouded in the shadow of war. As an artist, he was more sensitive to changes in his psychological state: the crumbling human civilization and the endless war have been pounding on everyone's fragile nerves.
 
In 1941, Giacometti returned to his mother's side in Geneva due to World War II. Subsequently, the Germans banned the issuance of visas, and he was unable to return to Paris and had to stay in Switzerland until the end of the war.
 
During his stay in his hometown, Giacometti met his future wife Annette Arm, who became his favorite model. During the post-war period, he began to create tall and thin character images. Between 1947 and 1951, Alberto Giacometti sculpted many images of men and women walking alone or in groups.


In 1948, he held a solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Prior to this exhibition, he remained silent in the art world for nearly 15 years. Sartre wrote the article "La recherche de l'absolu" for the exhibition, which was used as the preface to the exhibition album.
 
Sartre worked hard to shape Giacometti as an existentialist, and his eloquent manifesto immediately became a core part of Giacometti's mythology.
 
The combination of the two has made Giacometti more quickly accepted by more people and labeled him as a master of existential art. However, it is evident that using existentialism alone to interpret Giacometti's artistic philosophy is still incomplete.
What he really wants is to be completely loyal to his visual experience and fully express the characters he perceives:
 
There are countless models between me and the model
 
He is separated from the object of observation by Rodin's David and Buder's Heracles, which are what sculpture should look like in the eyes of others.
 
In the 1950s, the body of the characters he sculpted became increasingly thin, reduced to only a few lines depicting the fragility of the characters' lives:
 
A man walking on the street has little weight, much lighter than a dead body or unconscious person. He relies on his legs to maintain balance, but cannot feel the heaviness of his body. This is the feeling I subconsciously want to reproduce... by shaping a finer contour to present that lightness
 

Three Walking Men

The Three Walking Men depicts a brief encounter of their lonely lives during the post-war reconstruction period in the turbulent atmosphere of Paris. The three characters meet here, but ignore each other and move in the opposite direction.
 
In line with 'Walking Man', 'Standing Woman' is a nude sculpture of a woman. She was facing forward, motionless; The character's feet are welded together and firmly fixed to the ground.
 
These characters without backgrounds or identities are simplified to only their most fundamental morphological features, symbolizing human nature in the most common form. Their brief moments of almost equilibrium are like humans on the brink of stability or collapse.
 


 
This "deformed" sculpture makes people burst into tears, as if they have seen themselves walking alone in the vast universe:
 
He/she walked every step cautiously, trying his/her best to maintain a certain balance in life.
 
Occasionally, he also feels lost and empty in maintenance. This emptiness points to an invisible reality:
 
——It is the unsociable person who is known as the "weirdo" and is devoted to himself with all his might.