A giant leap for Giacometti

When Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture L’Homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) became the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction this week, I couldn’t help thinking of Orson Welles’s famous speech in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance,” says Welles, playing the villain Harry Lime. “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Clearly, Welles’s character had forgotten about Giacometti, who was born in an inaccessible valley in the Swiss Alps in 1901. When L’Homme qui marche I, estimated at £12 million to £18 million, went under the hammer for more than £65 million at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday evening, the Swiss sculptor, who spent most of his life working in a filthy, troglodytic studio in Paris, trumped every artist who had ever lived.