"I keep coming back to these women...around them space vibrates," the writer Jean Genet once said of the seminal Femmes de Venise. Conceived in 1956 with the first examples cast in bronze the following year, the present sculpture is the second of Giacometti's celebrated series of nine standing female nudes, collectively known as the Femmes de Venise. These standing women are perhaps Giacometti's best known works, regarded by many as the artist's most significant contribution to twentieth-century art and among the most acclaimed sculptures in art history.
While, by the mid-1950s, exhibitions dedicated to Giacometti’s work had been held in numerous countries—ranging from the United States to Germany to England—the French State, Giacometti’s home for almost the entirety of his adult life, had yet to sponsor an exhibition of the sculptor’s work. It might seem ironic, therefore, when “in the autumn of 1955 he received an official invitation to exhibit a selection of his works not in France but in the main galley of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the following June” (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1985, p. 355). With the Biennale and another exhibition in Bern both opening in June of 1956 Giacometti set to work producing a group of fifteen standing female figures. Ten of the plaster figures were exhibited in Venice in groups of four and six as “works in progress,” and the remaining five plasters were shown in Bern as Figures I-V. Shortly afterwards, Giacometti selected eight plasters from the Biennale and one from the Bern exhibition to cast in bronze, calling them Femme de Venise regardless of where they had been shown (see fig. 1). Within two years bronzes of these static figures would be exhibited in the United States at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1958 (see fig. 2). Going forward, few major exhibitions dedicated to Giacometti’s work would fail to include at least one of these Venetian women.
Jean Genet, who was Giacometti's favorite living author, provided a sensually-evocative description of these figures in the essay he published in 1957: "I can't stop touching the statues: I look away and my hand continues its discoveries of its own accord: neck, head, nape of neck, shoulders... The sensations flow to my fingertips. Each one is different, so that my hand traverses an extremely varied and vivid landscape... The backs of these women may be more human than their fronts. The nape of the neck, the shoulders, the small of the back, the buttocks seem to have been modeled more lovingly than any of the fronts. Seen from three-quarters, this oscillation from woman to goddess may be what is most disturbing: sometimes the emotion is unbearable... I cannot help returning to this race of gilded and sometimes painted sentries who, standing erect, motionless, keep watch" (reprinted in R. Howard, ed., The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, Hopewell, 1993, pp. 323-24).
James Lord, Giacometti’s biographer, writes about the creation of the Femmes de Venise series as follows: “Working with the same clay on the same armature, as he often did, Giacometti concentrated on a single rigidly erect figure of a nude woman, her body slender, attenuated, head held high, arms and hands pressed to her sides, feet outsized and rooted to the pedestal. She was modeled after a female figure in his mind’s eye, not from a living woman. In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses, as the sculptor’s fingers coursed compulsively over the clay. Not one of these innumerable states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea or form. If pleasantly surprised by the look of what his fingers had done, he would ask Diego to make a plaster cast, the business of a few hours. Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement. That is how the… Women of Venice came into being” (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1985, pp. 355-56).
The Femmes de Venise are direct descendants of the elongated female figures which Giacometti had been working on in the 1940s, such as Femme Leoni and precursors of the larger female figures that he would execute in the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Grande Femme I-IV (see figs. 3 & 4). Created at the median of this artistic development, the Femmes de Venise serve as the summation of Giacometti's findings in this particular subject. The variations among the nine Femmes, when considered as a group, demonstrate the metamorphoses of Giacometti's vision of the female form. From a technical standpoint, the differences in height and anatomy suggest that their numbering might not reflect the sequence in which Giacometti produced them. Valerie Fletcher has suggested that the nine Femmes were randomly renumbered when the artist selected them from among the original plasters for casting into bronze.
The present sculpture is one of the most powerful and authoritative of the nine bronzes in the series. Of the nine figures, number two is among the most elongated and abstracted. The form is one of the tallest of the group and its base one of the most sloped. These figures, tall and thin as they may be, frontally possess breadth at their shoulders and hips, where each figure’s hands become nearly indistinguishable from her torso. Giacometti explained in conversation to David Sylvester the transformation of his perception into three dimensional form: “If I were to represent in sculpture the perception I have of you, I would make a rather flat, scarcely modeled sculpture. It would be much more like a Cycladic sculpture—looking stylized—than a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which both look real” (reproduced in Exh. Cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg & Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, Alberto Giacometti: The Origins of Space, 2010-11, p. 100). This focus on personal perception as opposed to more realistic depiction is one of the crowning achievements of modern art and Giacometti, perhaps more than any other artist, is the one who brought this focus in being. Giacometti’s struggle with form, scale and condition would inspire future generations of artists working in various sculpture media from his contemporary Picasso, whose series of bathers also created in 1956 provides a playful counterpoint to the Femmes de Venise to de Kooning’s tactile bronzes to Moore’s magisterial figures (see below).
Giacometti's Influence on Modern and Contemporary Sculpture
In its grace and poise, silent majesty and modernity, Femme de Venise II is the epitome of Giacometti’s mature vision and an enduring presence in his oeuvre. According to the Fondation Giacometti Femme de Venise II was cast in an edition of nine bronzes between 1957 and 1976. Other casts of this sculpture belong to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum; the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek and the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The painted plaster forms part of the collection of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.
