Giacometti’s “Walking Man”: from sculpture to Swiss stamp
Swiss Post is honouring Alberto Giacometti with a new stamp featuring Walking Man I (L’Homme qui marche I), issued to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death.
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Giacometti’s “Walking Man”: from sculpture to Swiss stamp
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The stamp was designed by art curator Carolin A. Geist. In homage to Giacometti’s famous slender and elongated sculptures, the stamp also has a unique format: exceptionally long and thin, it is in portrait format (20 x 44 mm).
Carolin A. Geist is enthusiastic: “It is a wonderful way of magically staging cultural exchange, that an anniversary in the art world is not only celebrated in elitist circles at museum lectures, but with a small and very affordable object that, at only CHF1.20, is within everyone’s reach,” she told the Keystone-ATS news agency.
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She hopes it will become a “historical stamp”, thus contributing to Switzerland’s cultural history and entering the public’s collective memory, as happened, for example, with the CHF100 banknote of 1995, which featured the Swiss artist.
A world-famous work
Asked about the limits and possibilities of developing such a stamp, Carolin A. Geist replied: “From a legal point of view, the limits lie in copyright. We had to work closely with ProLitteris to protect the artist’s rights.”
She believes there is also a moral limit: “I asked myself how we could properly honour Alberto Giacometti. Should we have chosen his portrait as the subject? One of his lesser-known works? Or his most famous work, so that even those who are not art experts could recognise the stamp?”
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Together with Swiss Post, they opted for Alberto Giacometti’s world-famous sculpture, L’Homme qui marche I from 1960, one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century.
The stamp will be available at Swiss post offices from Thursday 5 March. It is already available in Swiss Post’s online shop. Swiss Post confirmed to Keystone-ATS that 250,000 special edition stamps had been printed for sale.
Adapted from Italian by AI/sb
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