The Highest Paid Sculptures- Art Of Alberto Giacometti

Art / Comments (0) / January 23, 2012

“All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.”- Alberto Giacometti.

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was born in the canton Graubünden’s southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter. Alberto was the eldest of four children and was interested in art from the beginning of his life.

Composition (Man and Woman) 1927

Giacometti’s work of the 1930s represents probably the most important contribution to surrealist sculpture. In an effort to explore themes derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, like sexuality, obsession and trauma, he developed a variety of different sculptural objects.

Hour of the Traces, L’Heure des traces 1930

In the late 1930s, Giacometti abandoned abstraction and Surrealism, becoming more interested in how to represent the human figure in a convincing illusion of real space. He wanted to depict figures in such a way as to capture a palpable sense of spatial distance, so that we, as viewers, might share in the artist’s own sense of distance from his model, or from the encounter that inspired the work. The solution he arrived at involved whittling the figures down to the slenderest proportions.

Walking Woman, Femme qui marche 1933-36

Although the 1950s art world of both Europe and the United States was dominated by abstract painting, Giacometti’s figurative sculpture came to be a hugely influential model of how the human figure might return to art. His figures represented human beings alone in the world, turned in on themselves and failing to communicate with their fellows, despite their overwhelming desire to reach out.

Man Pointing, Homme signalant 1947

In November 2000 a Giacometti bronze, Grande Femme Debout I, sold for $14.3 million. Grande Femme Debout II was bought by the Gagosian Gallery for $27.4 million at Christie’s auction in New York City on May 6, 2008. L’Homme qui marche I, a life-sized bronze sculpture of a man, became one of the most expensive works of art and the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction on February 2, 2010 when it sold for £65 million (US$104.3 million) at Sotheby’s, London. Grande tête mince, a large bronze bust, sold for $53.3 million just three months later.