Alberto Giacometti

Galerie Maeght, Paris

Private Collection, Paris

World House Galleries, New York

Stephan Hahn, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1980s

New York, World House Galleries, Giacometti, 1960, no. 9, illustrated in the catalogue

(possibly) Pittsburgh, The Carnegie Institute, 1968

Alberto Giacometti. Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Bücher (exhibition catalogue), Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, 1978, no. 197, illustration of another cast

Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul-de-Vence, 1978, no. 103, illustration of another cast

Very good condition. Apart from minor wear to the patina on the extremities consistent with age and handling, and some dirt within the crevices, this work is in very good condition.
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Femme debout is one of the most important motifs of Giacometti's art - the standing female figure. Throughout the 1940s and up until his death in 1966, Giacometti created several variations of a lone nude woman, her long, lean body anchored with heavy block feet to a base and frozen in time.  His many sculptural incarnations of this theme, most notably his series known as Femmes de Venise, highlight the dramatic contours of the body and the power of a single gesture. With its multiple connotations of stoicism, resilience, passivity, strength and vulnerability, it embodies the Existentialist concerns of artists and intellectuals working in Post-War Paris. 

The scale of his sculptures was an important component in Giacometti's creative vision and something that he discussed frequently with his companions.  Sculptures that were too big, or life size, "infuriated" him because they relied too much on imagination rather than on existential experience.  On the other hand, he found works that were too small to be "intolerable" because they were difficult to handle and materially unsustainable.  The present work, standing at 71 cm, was an ideal form for him to manipulate.  He could walk around it while simultaneously twisting and pinching it at all points and angles.  Working on this scale he liberated his figure from the mimicry of reality, eliminating the need for viewers to imagine the work in proportional relation to themselves.  By doing so, his figure became purely a concrete object in a clearly defined space. 

Dieter Honisch explains the complexities Giacometti faced with sculptures of this stature:  "The pictorial distance of Giacometti's figure, which rendered them thin and small, automatically raised the question of how they were to be granted the tactile proximity that is essential to sculpture.  Giacometti solved this problem in a two-fold way.  Firstly, he gave his figures a large base or pedestal.  Secondly, as his friends report, he generated a sense of proximity by incessantly fingering the clay models, hence giving the impression of surfaces seen from close up.  As a result, no one figure ever looked similar to another, because the final state emerged only from a continuous series of innumerable sculptural actions" (D. Honisch "Scale in Giacometti's Sculpture" in Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Munich & New York, 1994, p. 68).

Conceived in 1956, at the height of Giacometti's international acclaim, the present sculpture is related to the series of Giacometti's Femmes de Venise, which made their debut at the Venice Biennale the following year. After his success at the Biennale, Giacometti continued to develop the theme of standing female figures, elongating and accentuating the feminine curvature of the body and challenging the limits of the malleability and manipulation of his bronze figures. His exploration of this theme culminated in 1960 with his Grandes femmes, which were intended as part of a project for Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York City, followed by Femme debout, which was to be one of his last works on this subject.

According to the Giacometti Foundation, the present sculpture was cast in 1957 by the Susse Foundry in Paris.  Like his casts of Chat and Chien, the present work was cast during the artist's lifetime in an edition of eight.