Alberto Giacometti

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist)

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1965 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 11, 1999, lot 150)

Acquired at the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art & San Francisco Museum of Art, Alberto Giacometti, 1965-66

Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1974, illustration of another example p. 254

Herbert & Mercedes Matter, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1987, illustration of the plaster p. 136

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Femme, épaule cassée exemplifies one of the most important motifs of the artist's career— that of the solitary standing female figure. Giacometti first explored the subject in the 1940s, and the theme quickly became a dominant preoccupation until the end of his career. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Giacometti exaggerated the verticality of his standing women, eliminating the voluptuous contours that are classically associated with the female body.   Standing at attention for time eternal, these stoic forms were symbols of strength amidst the uncertainty of the Cold War era.  Giacometti exhibited this subject to much critical acclaim in 1956 with his series Femmes de Venise, and the present work is a variant of that aesthetic.  Femme, épaule cassée, which the artist first rendered in clay in 1958, is a severely narrowed and fragmented version of the canonical standing woman with a broken shoulder, taken to a new and dramatic extreme.

James Lord describes the ambitions and artistic process of the artist: "Seeing for him was equivalent to being, and it is obviously impossible for a man to make life. And yet Alberto had no other ambition. When working on a female figure in clay his fingers would run up and down the sculpture, pinching, gouging, scraping, caressing, as if they responded to a will of their own, independent of the incidental artist. Every pinch or caress transformed the figure, of course, but that was not his purpose.... he felt that the work did hold it against him unless he sacrificed himself entirely for its sake. And that's what he did" (J. Lord, "Alberto at Work," Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966 (exhibition catalogue), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 41).   Another cast of this work belongs to the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt.