Frank Scurti's Fourth Apple, Sculpture in Paris, France
La Quatrième Pomme de Frank Scurti is an outdoor sculpture on Boulevard de Clichy in Paris, placed on a historic stone pedestal. It consists of a large, polished stainless steel apple engraved with a world map, surrounded by four upright panels of colored, translucent glass.
The pedestal holding the sculpture originally supported a bronze statue of philosopher Charles Fourier, installed in 1899 and melted down by the Vichy regime in 1942. After decades of standing empty and hosting several unofficial art installations, the city of Paris organized a formal contest to place a new work there, and Franck Scurti's project was selected and unveiled in 2011.
La Quatrième Pomme sits on a stone pedestal along Boulevard de Clichy and draws the attention of passersby and visitors alike. The polished steel surface of the apple throws back reflections of the street and the people standing in front of it, turning the sculpture into an informal mirror of city life.
The sculpture stands on the central median of Boulevard de Clichy and is easy to spot from the sidewalk. It is freely accessible at all times and best seen on foot, walking around it to take in the different angles.
The title of the sculpture refers to a story told by philosopher Charles Fourier, who listed three famous apples in history and proposed a fourth one to illustrate the distortions caused by middlemen in trade. Scurti's work gives physical form to that fourth apple, which in Fourier's writing had remained just a theoretical idea.
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