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By the time Giacometti created Walking Man I, he had been sculpting his elongated human forms for nearly 15 years. Each of them had the same thin, stretched lines and corroded surfaces, and each embodied the same compelling sense of emaciated fragility. While each of his iterations of this form can be likened to another chorus in a decades-long threnody, in Walking Man I, Giacometti came close to capturing in a single sculpture the essence of the entire series. Which is not to say that Walking Man I is entirely typical. At nearly six feet tall, it is much larger than average, and, as the title states, it shows a man walking-most of Giacometti's people were standing still. Indeed, his figures were so emotionally charged that they didn't need to do anything to make a statement. Action seems almost anathema to them. But somehow the simple act of walking seems not only natural, but profoundly so. By sculpting one of his figures engaged in the fundamentally, almost definitively human act of walking, Giacometti contrived to say something profound about the human condition. The implications cast by this simple bronze figure-about pessimism, hope, despair, perseverance, pain, futility, and desire-are the sum total of what Giacometti's art spoke to the post-war generation, and continues to speak today.
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