L'homme qui marche, 1957

Print as lithograph on wove paper (papier vélin)

Dimensions: 76 x 58 cm

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss modernist sculptor, painter and graphic artist who lived and worked mainly in Paris after 1922. He is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. His work is influenced by Cubism, Surrealism and the philosophical questions surrounding the human condition, as well as by Existentialism and Phenomenology. During the war years, he initially created sculptures of minimal size, often only a few centimetres high. Giacometti tried to model people close to him as he remembered them after encounters. However, the artist perceived this development as a dead end, and in the post-war years he produced drawings and sculptures that reveal a contrary strategy. The figures in these drawings, including L'Homme qui marche, were now characterised by an excessive length, especially of the limbs.

According to art historians, L'Homme qui marche (The Striding Man), as a life-size sculpture, is "one of the most important works" by Giacometti. The occasion for lithographic works was Giacometti's first exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1951 - he created illustrations for the gallery magazine Maeghts. The numerous etchings and lithographs subsequently produced from 1953 onwards "take up the theme of the human figure as the axis of reference for the interpenetration of spatial dimensions that characterises his sculptural work" and "modulates it in confrontation with the drawing spatial perspectives."