There’s a man walking—
his arms and legs stretched like wires,
his posture leaning ever so slightly forward,
his body impossibly thin, like he might topple over with a gust of wind.
But he doesn’t fall.
He walks on.
This is Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man, and if you’ve seen it in person, you know—
it’s not just a sculpture.
It’s a feeling.
A body stripped down, a soul laid bare
Born in Switzerland in 1901, Giacometti lived through the chaos of both World Wars.
And like many artists of his time, those experiences shaped everything he made.
He wasn’t interested in perfect anatomy or polished surfaces.
He stripped away the excess—flesh, detail, noise—
until only the essential human presence remained.
His figures are raw, rough, and thin to the extreme.
But there’s strength in their fragility.
Even in a world falling apart, they stand.
They keep moving forward.
Existence, not aesthetics
Giacometti was deeply influenced by existentialism.
His close friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, once said his sculptures looked like they were "on the edge of disappearing."
That was the point.
His work was less about how people look, and more about how they exist.
How we take up space. How we endure.
And most of all, how alone we often are—even in a crowd.
“I'm never finished.”
He was obsessed with getting it just right—but never believed he did.
His brother Diego said,
“Alberto drew the same person thousands of times. But he never once said, ‘It’s finished.’”
That tireless repetition wasn’t about technique.
It was about understanding.
Every line, every cast was a new question:
What does it mean to be here?
To be seen?
The $140 million sculpture that said more than money ever could
In 2015, Walking Man I sold for over $140 million at auction.
But that number, impressive as it is, misses the point.
Because what really gives this sculpture its value
is the way it captures 20th-century humanity—scarred, shaken, but still walking.
It’s not beautiful in the traditional sense.
But it’s deeply human.
And that’s exactly why it hits so hard.
He drew like he sculpted
Giacometti wasn’t just a sculptor—he was an obsessive draughtsman.
His drawings are full of restless, layered lines, like he was carving the image out of paper.
You can almost feel him searching for the person with each stroke.
They’re not portraits.
They’re attempts.
Attempts to understand someone else’s presence—
or maybe, his own.
A legacy that walks beside us
Today, his work lives on at the Pompidou Centre, MoMA, and the Giacometti Foundation in Switzerland.
You can see not just his sculptures, but the notes, sketches, and scraps he left behind—
evidence of a life spent trying to make sense of what it means to simply… be.
Artists still stand in front of his work and pause.
Because that thin bronze figure, walking against the odds,
is still all of us.
Not loud. Not heroic. Just human.
And sometimes, that’s the bravest thing art can say.