Chariot

This work of Alberto Giacometti in the top three most expensive sculptures ever sold at public auction. In 2014 "The chariot" paid 101 million dollars. On the first two places, also of Giacometti: "Walking man" and "Pointing man". This obsession with the Swiss sculptor, who sculpted in postwar Paris, of the human figure-mirages thinned, exhausted symbols terrible time swept the auctions, collectors and the world's best museums from the beginning of the XXI century. Sleepy, relaxed interest the entire second half of the XX century - and suddenly Giacometti everywhere: in the news, movies, museums. For example, this same "The chariot" got her the previous owner less than $ 2 million for a mere 30 years ago, in the early 1980s. And now 50 times more expensive.

"The chariot" the first large sculpture that Giacometti created after the Second world war. While Paris was occupied, he lived in the Swiss hotel and sculpted tiny figures the size of 5-6 cm (1, 2), made people invisible by surrounding them with the endless, lonely, frightening volume of the void. Already in 1947, he remembered the sculpture, which was once seen in a dream or in a vision. In his mind she had been ready and done - only fashion. It was an old story.

In 1938, drunk American raced the car in Paris and, without slowing, hit by Alberto Giacometti on the area of the Pyramids. Few months he spent in the hospital: his right leg was crushed and mutilated. Giacometti would limp the rest of your life - for the waddling gait of his will then to learn from a distance on the night streets of Montparnasse. And yet it is treated - and this is a tedious hospital inaction he's making a few sketches. In the corridors of a nurse with a quiet, measured tinkling roll carts with medications and this sound brings to mind Alberto image of a woman-a goddess of a female Ghost that moves in the chariot.

Takes almost 10 years - and he will see the sculpture solid and formed. In the 1950's will make 6 castings of bronze and two of them will cover in some places with paint and gold patina. The biographer of Giacometti, who saw "The chariot" in the sculptor's Studio, stood in front of her, were talking about the inexplicable magic, this bronze figure was doing: as close to it no fit, it always seems that she has moved and remains in an unreachable depth, unreachable removal.James Lord said it moves inward, like a dream that it is exciting and scary. Sartre wrote that it exists in a kind of borderline between being and nothingness. Later critics award "The chariot" heroic pathos, make a symbol of the postwar updates and stubborn vitality. In her historically deep, ancient sources, reported the sculpture of the energy of divinity, paradnosti: Delphic charioteer, and the Egyptian chariot, which Giacometti seen in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, and even the monument to Joan of Arc that flashed in the eyes of the sculptor, when he was knocked over by a car on square Pyramids.

But in addition to this existential pathos and phenomenal spatial abilities, the popularity of the Giacometti sculptures in the last couple of decades is due to another fact. In 2003 was founded the Foundation Alberto and Annette Giacometti in Paris, which started compiling an electronic database of jobs, search and seizure of counterfeits, collecting archives and documents. Not having its own exhibition space, the Foundation began to work with the most famous curators and galleries to participate in the Grand exhibitions of Giacometti, and even fearlessly to deal with the authentication works without fear of litigation. And if Giacometti is already everywhere, in the near future of news, films and exhibitions with the tag "Giacometti" should only become greater.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova