L’homme qui marche II (Walking Man II)

After World War II, Giacometti turned from his earlier Cubist and Surrealist work and became especially interested in creating figures that would always appear to the viewer as if from a great distance, no matter how close one stood. He achieved this by paring the figure down to its essential components, and by making the figure as lean as possible. But Giacometti’s fragile men and women are also inseparable from the post-war attitudes that were crystallized in the writings of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. An ardent admirer of Giacometti, Sartre believed that it was naive to hope for any higher purpose in life since man, though free, was alone and responsible only to himself for his actions. Giacometti’s emaciated, post-Holocaust figures with their eroded, crumbling surfaces suggest the antithesis of heroism or nobility, associations traditionally linked to European sculpture. An avid people-watcher, Giacometti drew his inspiration from the world around him: “In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity… it’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do.” (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)