this is the "walking man" by Giacometti, taken at the Maeght Foundation in Saint Paul de Vence in Southern France where he worked in the early 60ties and made several similar statues; one of them was sold at a record price: see below: As The Wall Street Journal put it: Alberto Giacometti's 1960 sculpture of a spindly man, "Walking Man I," sold for 65 million pounds ($104.3 million) in a Sotheby's auction, shattering the record price for a work of art at auction and signaling a potential resurgence in the art market. In a tense contest at the company's London salesroom, bidding began at ??12 million and then escalated, with roughly 10 bidders vying for the sculpture. The winner, who pays the final bid plus Sotheby's commission, bid over the telephone through Philip Hook, senior director of Sotheby's European operations, and chose to remain anonymous. The 6-foot-tall bronze depicts a wiry man in mid-stride, his right foot jutting forward, his head erect and and his arms hanging at his side. Giacometti, a modern master known for his haunting sculptures of blank-faced Everymen, cast the work 60 years ago as part of a commission to plant several of his bronze figures on Chase Manhattan Bank's Pine Street plaza in New York City. The artist famously struggled with the project, eventually quitting it but casting stand-alone versions of several of the planned figures, including "Walking Man I." The price breaks the existing $104.2 million auction record, set six years ago at Sotheby's, for Pablo Picasso's 1906 portrait "Boy With a Pipe," whose buyer remains unknown