Aug 092009
“Run, run. Run as fast as you can!” That was my interpretation when I saw this sculpture on Victory Road (Calea Victoriei in Romanian). So I smiled when I found out that the name of the sculpture is – what else – “The Runners”. Maybe I should switch careers and become an art critic 🙂 To my surprise, the artist is a French sculptor, Alfred Boucher which was, according to wikipedia, a mentor to Camille Claudel and friend of Auguste Rodin.
Nice find! I like this sculpture and the whole picture. Do you have an idea from whom or what they are running away from?
No idea. There's little information available about the sculpture (and I have looked through several books and extensively on the Internet). Maybe they're running from the ugly building behind them 🙂
LOL! 🙂 Actually, I like that contrast a lot. This doesn't look like a place where you usually would expect art. Anyway, is this building Communist-era architecture or post-communism?
By the looks of it, my guess is that is a Communist-era building. Definitely not post-communism. I too liked the contrast between the building and the statue. The street this building is on is probably the most famous in Bucharest. It's full of old beautiful buildings but here and there you find a building like this one. Many of the old buildings on this road were damaged in the last big earthquake (1977) and buildings like the one in the photo were built to replace them.
I just found a passage in a book, which refers to the square where I took this photo "The square contains … and three apartment buildings erected in the 1960, when the square took its actual shape. The statue "The runners" (1912, Alfred de Boucher) was moved here from its place in front of the Romanian Atheneum in the 1950s".