The Most Expensive Alberto Giacometti Works to Sell at Auction

Sold For: $28.5 million

Femme Leoni (1947) sold at Sotheby’s New York on May 16, 2023, as one of the marquee lots of the house’s Modern Evening Auction. The bronze, estimated at $25 million to $35 million, realized $28.5 million, setting a new auction benchmark for the Femme Leoni series. Conceived in 1947 and cast in 1960, the sculpture came from a private American collection, having descended from Swiss curator Franz Meyer, who received it as a gift from the artist.

Femme Leoni belongs to the first generation of Giacometti’s postwar standing women, a motif that, alongside Walking Man, came to define his mature oeuvre. Cast by Susse Fondeur in an edition of eight, the beanstalk-thin figure continues the artist’s enduring meditation on existential solitude—frail but unbroken, alone even in a room full of admirers.

Sold for: $29.5 million

Grande femme II (1960) came to Christie’s Paris on October 19, 2017, as part of the landmark Paris Avant-Garde sale—and became the most expensive work of art sold in France that year. At roughly nine feet tall, the towering bronze is Giacometti’s largest sculpture. “What struck me above all is its majesty,” Pierre Martin-Vivier, then director of 20th-century art at Christie’s in Paris, said at the time. “It was as though I was in front of a statue from Chartres, or an African totem. And the detail is incredible. The surface is very irregular, and it moves with the light.”

Giacometti created four Grande femme sculptures (numbered I through IV) in 1960 on commission from architect Gordon Bunshaft for the plaza in front of Chase Manhattan Bank’s New York headquarters. According to Christie’s, Giacometti was inspired by the magnificence of Manhattan’s skyline and scaled up the series accordingly. He created around 10 versions of Grande femme, none of which satisfied his exacting vision, and the commission was ultimately abandoned. The sculptures, however, lived on: in 1962, two versions of Grande femme were installed at the Venice Biennale.

Sold For: $30.2 million

Trois hommes qui marchent (Grand plateau) (1948–49) sold at Sotheby’s New York on November 14, 2022, as part of the auction house’s Modern Evening Auction. One of Giacometti’s most significant postwar bronzes, Grand plateau carried an estimate of $20 million to $30 million. A seven-minute bidding war—the longest of the November season, Artnet News reported at the time—pushed the final price to $30.2 million, placing the sculpture among the artist’s top auction performers. The buyer has never been publicly identified, though The Art Newspaper reported that they triumphed over three telephone bidders.

Trois hommes qui marchent is one of only two known casts of the Grand plateau version, which depicts three emaciated figures advancing across a single platform—an image that has prompted interpretations of isolation and the frayed human condition in the wake of World War II. The Fondation Giacometti has drawn parallels between the scene and the artist’s refuge in Switzerland during the war and his return to Paris in 1945. “One noteworthy aspect of the sculpture is its base, which alludes to that of a public monument, glorifying the anonymous hero,” the foundation writes.

Sold For: $32.6 million

This 1954 oil-on-canvas portrait made some ripples during Christie’s otherwise tepid Impressionist and modern sale in New York on November 5, 2013, when it sold for $32,645,000, then a world auction record for a painting by Giacometti. The house, meanwhile, took in a total of $144.3 million that night, well below its low estimate of $188.8 million.

Diego en chemise écossaise hammered below its $30 million low estimate, selling to its third-party guarantor. Despite its essentially assured sale, the lot was notable by virtue of its rarity: paintings are a relatively scarce commodity in an oeuvre better known for sculpture. When asked at the following press conference why the estimate had been set so high, auctioneer Andreas Rumbler reportedly replied that the buyer was a devotee of the Giacometti market and pleased with the purchase price.

Sold for: $50 million

“From the start, all eyes were on Grande tête mince (Grande tête de Diego),” reads a firsthand account in The New York Times of Sotheby’s November 6, 2013, Impressionist and modern art sale. Four bidders were reportedly vying for the bronze bust of the artist’s brother, conceived in 1954 and cast in 1955. The sculpture was estimated to fetch $35 million to $55 million and ultimately sold for just over $50 million to James G. Niven, then chairman of Sotheby’s America, bidding on behalf of Acquavella Galleries. The price fell below expectations but still set a record for Giacometti. The work came to Sotheby’s from London dealer Desmond Corcoran, who had owned it for more than 30 years.

The sculpture depicts Giacometti’s younger brother, Diego, his lifelong collaborator and most enduring model. Giacometti is perhaps best known for his portraits, which he relentlessly reworked in his pursuit of genuine human presence. He once said he could spend an entire day trying to realize a single head, only to “start again from zero.”

Sold for: $53.3 million

At more than two feet in height, Grande tête mince is the largest of the busts Giacometti realized during the 1950s, dwarfed only by the subsequent Grande tête. Craggy, life-size, elongated, and abject, it is a quintessential Giacometti portrait of the period. Christie’s sold the work in New York on May 4, 2010, for $53,282,500, contextualizing the sculpture within Giacometti’s artistic evolution: The full-bodied figurines he’d dedicated the last decade “made him famous in Europe and America,” the house wrote, “and indeed his eagerness to move beyond these sculptures also had much to do with casting off the stifling burden of their success and the expectations that they had fostered in the public eye.”

Sold for: $78.4 million

Le Nez (1949) came to Sotheby’s New York on November 15, 2021, as a casualty of Harry and Linda Macklowe’s court-ordered collection sale following their high-profile divorce. Fierce bidding for the surreal bronze, suspended within a cage-like frame, drove the final price to $78.4 million, making it the fourth most expensive Giacometti ever sold at auction.

It is also one of Giacometti’s most psychologically charged creations—an impressive distinction in an oeuvre populated by haunted, existential figures. Le Nez presents a gaunt, howling head with a Pinocchio-like nose reaching beyond the bars of its cage. The Fondation Giacometti connects the sculpture to a 1946 text in which the artist recounts a nightmare of a monstrous spider hanging from the ceiling, suggesting the work emerged from the same excavation of memory and the subconscious. Purchased by an anonymous bidder, the sale demonstrated that, even in a cooling post-pandemic art market, demand for museum-quality Giacomettis remained high.

Sold for: $100.97 million

Chariot (1950) arrived at Sotheby’s New York on November 4, 2014, boasting one of the highest estimates ever assigned to a sculpture: more than $100 million. The painted bronze on a wooden base met those expectations, selling for $100.97 million after a brisk bidding contest and becoming only the third sculpture to achieve a nine-figure price at auction.

One of just six casts, Chariot depicts a spindly female figure perched—almost precariously—on a two-wheeled platform reminiscent of a Pharaonic ceremonial chariot. Giacometti said the work was inspired in part by the memory of a “sparkling pharmacy cart” he saw in a hospital corridor while recovering from a car accident in 1938. He also described a desire to place a figure in empty space “in order to see it better and to situate it at a precise distance from the floor.” The buyer was later identified as hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, marking his second record-breaking Giacometti acquisition in as many years.

Sold for: £65 million ($104.3 million)

When L’Homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) (1961) came to Sotheby’s London on February 3, 2010, there was little doubt it would make history. One of Giacometti’s most iconic sculptures, the monumental bronze had remained in a private collection for decades and was expected to fetch between £12 million and £18 million. The bidding battle lasted just eight minutes, with the winning bidder paying £65 million ($104.3 million). At the time, it became the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction—a record surpassed just three months later by Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.

Walking Man I is quintessential Giacometti: a lone, elongated figure frozen mid-stride. Cast in an edition of six, the other examples reside in major museum collections, including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The identity of the 2010 buyer remains unconfirmed. What is certain is that the sale cemented Giacometti as one of the few sculptors capable of commanding nine-figure prices at auction.

Sold for: $141.3 million

L’Homme au doigt (1947) hit the block at Christie’s on May 11, 2015, amid intense market speculation: Could the six-foot-tall bronze, offered for sale for the first time in 45 years, break the auction record for any sculpture? The answer was a resounding yes. The work sold for a staggering $141.3 million with fees, setting a record that still stands today.

Giacometti produced six casts of the sculpture, now divided among private collections, the Giacometti Foundation, and museums. Shortly after the sale, Page Six identified the mysterious buyer as hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, who added the work to his renowned collection of modern and contemporary art. A year earlier, Cohen had also been the winning—and reportedly sole—bidder for another Giacometti on this list, Chariot (1950), purchasing it at Sotheby’s for just over $100.9 million.

L’Homme au doigt, or Pointing Man as it is commonly known in English, is “one of the great 20th-century sculptures,” Manhattan dealer William Acquavella said after the sale. “Steve is a very serious, very astute collector,” he added. “He also has the right instincts, ones that can’t be learned from reading art-history books.”