“It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get, the more differently I see.”
Conceived in 1956-57 and cast the following year, at the height of Giacometti's international acclaim, the present sculpture is exactly contemporaneous with the artist’s celebrated series Femmes de Venise, which made their debut at the Venice Biennale of 1956. The female figure is a subject that appears throughout Giacometti’s œuvre, from his earliest sketches, through the Surrealist works of the 1930s and into the post-war period. The sculptures of the 1950s represent the artist’s search for the ideal and idealised female figure. Highly stylised and with a pronounced verticality, these works are woman reduced to her essence; remote and serious, fragile yet strong, and evoking a timelessness that speaks of the wider human condition.
In this interrogation of the human psyche and experience, Giacometti was very much in step with his time. In the years immediately following the Second World War, Existentialism became the dominant thread of philosophical and literary discourse and whilst Giacometti never sought to produce ‘Existentialist’ art, his works undoubtedly explore questions about the nature of the self. At the same time, there is an element of his work that is ageless, seeming to slip the bounds of modernity entirely. Throughout the 1940s Giacometti had made regular studies of Egyptian and Etruscan statuary, both in person at the Louvre and working from reproductions, and these became an important source of inspiration in the creation of his frontal female figures. His belief that attempts to mimic reality through techniques like contrapposto preserved an untruth led him to the deliberately hieratic forms of ancient sculpture which preserved a truthfulness; as he once proclaimed: ‘The works of the past that I find the most true to reality are those that are considered the least, the furthest from it’ (quoted in Herbert & Mercedes Matter, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1987, p. 211).
Describing his standing women of the 1950s, Valerie Fletcher observes: ‘these female figures serve as archetypes of indestructible human nature. Despite the struggles that have ravaged their flesh, these women are immutable; their irreducible core has survived. Throughout his life […] Giacometti made pencil and ink studies of many works of art, seeking to grasp what made them great. Among sculptures he favoured ancient and primitive figures, including Cycladic fertility goddesses, Ocean carvings and especially Egyptian statues with their standing and walking poses and large staring eyes. Like these hieratic sources, Giacometti’s figures have a mythic grandeur that is eternal’ (V. Fletcher, in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988-89, p. 45).
“All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time.”
Giacometti takes the enduring grandeur of these ancient models and transforms it; his works have the same presence, but they are also alive in the spaces they occupy. The roughly modelled surfaces of his sculptures seem to contain even now the energy of the artist at work. As Fletcher notes of his 1950s figures: ‘Working with more physical substance Giacometti explored the tangible nature of sculpture and developed more expressively modelled surfaces. His hands travelled restlessly up and down the forms […]. Besides his bare hands, he used a modelling knife and spatula to bite into the surfaces where he wanted to focus intensity, usually in the face and especially the eyes’ (V. Fletcher, in ibid., p. 43).
The Essence of Giacometti’s Existentialist Sculpture
Giacometti pursued his artistic vision with a relentless energy, often reworking figures; many works were destroyed, or existed simultaneously in different forms, the ‘complete’ work an anathema in a quest that was ongoing. The result is a body of works that seem to balance the corporeal and enduring with a sense of the momentary, creating figures of immense expressive power.
This work belongs to an edition of 8 bronzes; the plaster is held at the Giacometti Stiftung and there are other casts in the collections of the Museum of Art, University of Michigan; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
