Modern sculptures on the Champs Elysees

Giacometti's Man Walking seems to step up his pace, Cesar's Rambo wobbles on his roller skates and Calder's Five Wings gathers up speed to take off from the ground. These are just a few of the 48 huge sculptures presented in Paris on the Champs Elysees, which has been turned into a vast open-air museum for the next few months.

Les Champs de la Sculpture (The Fields of Sculpture) is the name of the unusual open-air exhibition by the City of Paris. Presenting European modern sculpture, from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s, these gigantic works will astonish tens of thousands of passers-by.

Placed at 25 meter intervals on either side of the most beautiful avenue in the world, over a distance of one kilometer, these works have been carefully aligned four meters from the trees, without even one flower being disturbed in an environ which is itself a historical monument.

Rodin's monumental Balzac opens the exhibition, standing on an enormous pedestal in the middle of the large crossroads of Rond Point des Champs Elysees.

At Place de la Concorde, a 49th work can only be seen after nightfall; the intense blue lighting of the Luxor obelisk, imagined in 1958 by the champion of blue, the painter and sculptor Yves Klein, but created for the first time in 1983.

In between these two magnificent pieces all manner of contemporary art is displayed. Cubism, surrealism, abstract, "new realism" and cinetism. Many materials are used, including bronze, polyester, stone, iron, granite, wood, steel, aluminum, concrete and resin.

Some particularly noteworthy pieces draw the passers-by. Picasso's Woman Standing, who manages to look young and airy despite her seven tonnes; Pablo Gargallo's Prophet, which was his last work; Henri Laurens' Great Musician, a curvy nude a far cry from his early cubist works; and Henry Moore's Bold, with its round shapes fitting into one another like articulated bones.

The diversity of artists and their works will make summer in Paris a draw for anyone's trip to France. The total budget for the exhibition is 7 million francs (US$1.4 million), more than 4 million francs of which were contributed by a foundation and a group of Japanese industrialist. Indeed, the next stop for this wondrous exhibition will be Tokyo in the autumn.