Walking Man, Alberto Giacometti’s most famous work, is an icon of 20th-Century art. With this theme, Giacometti (1901-1966) succeeded in concentrating the expressive energy of his oeuvre and in representing the most powerful aspiration of his time: evoking the humanity and history of the world through art.
For the first time, all life-size models of the Walking Man are gathered together with most of the variations on that theme, sculpted and drawn.
In the symbolic Walking Man sculptures, the artist conveyed everything about the human being with the greatest economy of means: a matter compressed to its extreme limit, an attitude devoid of pathos, essentially human in its simplicity, a symbol without emphasis, a title without lyricism.
The exhibition retraces the genealogy of the motif, from the Walking Woman of the Surrealist period to the icons created in 1959-60, recontextualized with a series of documents and drawings, some of which have never been shown before.
