In the late summer of 1930, Picasso created a series of slender statuettes carved out of wood. These sculptures were more compressed in form than any he had ever attempted, marking a return to his early rough-hewn carvings of the 1900s as well as a sudden change of direction from the metal welded collaborations made with Julio Gonzáles in the late 1920s. Whittled out of fragments of stretchers in his studio in Boisgeloup, these elongated figures have proportions that give the impressions of giantesses. As Roland Penrose notes, “This ability to give scale to small objects so that they appear to be colossal is present throughout his work” (Roland Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso, New York, 1967, p. 25).

A photograph of Picasso’s studio taken in 1943 by the French photographer Brassaï shows several of the figurines on display on the top shelf of a glass vitrine. Picasso admired Brassaï because of his ability to convey the monumentality of his sculptures and he was always eager to see the latest set of pictures to have been developed since they allowed him to look at his own work from without. “Read this book if you want to understand me” he said of Brassaï’s photo-chronicle Conversations with Picasso (1964).

In 1930, the magazine Documents published an essay illustrated with Etruscan bronzes from the Louvre and the Villa Giulia in Rome. “With all due caution in postulating a direct influence on Picasso, the parallels visible here—hieratic verticals from which only the arms slightly project—can hardly be coincidental,” writes Werner Spies. “The Etruscan bronzes seem to arrest movement and gesture. The eccentric shape of the wood from which Picasso carved most of his figures placed limitations on non-vertical movement” (Werner Spies, Picasso, The Sculptures, New York, 2000, p. 157).

This extraordinary and limited group of figurines was produced in a short burst of creativity before Picasso moved on to very different forms of expression with his bulbous bust sculptures of Marie-Thérèse the following year. They made a lasting impression, however, on Alberto Giacometti who met Picasso in 1931 and saw him regularly for the next twenty years. On first acquaintance the two artists were incredibly close and Picasso’s elongated forms in sculptures such as Femme debout were almost certainly the basis of the younger sculptor’s earliest experiments in attenuation with Femme qui marche. It is impossible to understand Giacometti’s ‘Surrealist period’ without keeping in mind all that Picasso’s art offered him at this time. Given the bearing which Giacometti’s sculpture had on the course of twentieth-century art it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the daring group of figurines by Picasso which inspired him.