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Grande femme I is one of a series of four monumental female figures that Giacometti created for an outdoor sculpture installation in Chase Manhattan Plaza. The installation was never completed but the four Grande femme became iconic in their own right and have been widely exhibited both independently and as an ensemble since their conception in 1960 (see fig. 1). Each approximately nine feet in height, these figures were the largest that the artists ever made and are often regarded as the culmination of his life’s work as a sculptor.
The initiative for creating this series came about in 1956, when Gordon Bunshaft, the architect for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York City’s financial district, asked Giacometti to design a group of sculptures for the building’s large plaza on Pine Street. Although Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder had been considered for the commission, Giacometti seemed the obvious choice, considering his fascination with the theme of the city square in the 1940s and 1950s (see fig 2). According to James Lord, the artist “was immediately responsive to the American proposal. It is true that he felt a keen nostalgia for the idea of executing a sculpture to be placed in a city square and that the theme of people seen either singly or in groups in urban environments had long been important to him. It is also true that he had always been accustomed to seeing figures that looked no larger than pins below the towering peaks of Bregaglia. And crucial turning points in his development and come from the vision of the female figures in city streets at night, once in Padua, once in Paris. Alberto wrote to his mother of the project. It interested him passionately he said” (J. Lord, Giacometti, A Biography, New York, 1983, pp. 377-78).
Initially Bunchaft had envisioned for the plaza an enlarged version of Giacometti’s Three Walking Men of 1949, heightening the original sculpture to nearly sixty feet to suit the scale of his sixty story building (see fig. 3). But because Giacometti was chiefly concerned with the precise spatial relationships of his sculptures, he was not inclined to alter arbitrarily the dimensions of his original work. Instead, he proposed an entirely new composition that would be tailored to the proportions of the space in question. This proposed sculptural ensemble would consist of a head on a pedestal, a walking man and a standing woman—three themes which dominated the artist’s oeuvre. Working from a cardboard scale model of Chase Manhattan Plaza, Giacometti created variant small models of these figures in his studio in Paris. In 1960, he finally cast a head, two variations of the walking man and four different tall standing women. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in their recent Giacometti exhibition presented this composed grouping in front of a photograph depicting Chase Manhattan Plaza, giving a sense of the intent of this installation.
Christian Klemm has discussed the significance of the figures the artist chose for this project, and points out that Grand femme was perhaps the most meaningful of the group: “Having reclaimed real space in the 1950s with sculptures that display a new three-dimensional solidity, Giacometti was in position to form larger-than-life free standing figures and thus to realize both concepts by merging them. By their dimensions alone the figures rise above the everyday—although they are anchored in it by being placed in a particular position—touching on the sphere typical of traditional cult figures. Not part of the transcendental realism of religion and myth, they nevertheless point to past time—the walking man as the epitome of human striving, the head as a symbol of seeing consciousness. The tradition of the cult image is seen at its clearest in the motionless, tall standing woman. Its form required the most concentrated stylization for the autonomous sculptural quality of the figure to have an epiphantic effect on the viewer” (Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York & Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, 2001-02, p. 232). Confronting Grande femme I evokes both awe and curiosity. The viewer is drawn towards the tactile nature of the bronze surface while the totemic quality holds one at arm’s length.
Because of their monumental size, the four standing women would have been the central focus of the sculptural ensemble. The image of the standing woman had a long history in Giacometti’s production—its most famous incarnation perhaps being his Femme de Venise of 1956-57, which are considered the direct precursors of the Grande femme series (see fig. 4). But the Grande femme also have ties to even earlier compositions by the artist, according to Valerie J. Fletcher: “Their size and grouping recall two earlier attempts at larger outdoors sculpture. On a visit to Maloja in the early 1930s, Giacometti had made a plaster sculpture of three tall, abstract, thin figures standing in a field (no longer extant). The most significant antecedent for Giacometti’s Chase Manhattan project was the 1948 City Square sculpture, where several men stride past immobile women in an urban plaza” (Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966 (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. & San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, 1988, p. 216; see figs. 1 & 5).
Giacometti never submitted his final versions of these sculptures to the selection committee in New York, and his intentions for displaying these works in the plaza were never clarified. His reservations rested mostly with his mixed feelings about the size of the Femmes, which he felt were too tall. As late as 1964, he remarked to James Lord “it isn’t desirable to do large things, in either painting or in sculpture.” It is important to note that Giacometti had not yet seen the intended site of these works while he was creating them and was perhaps not able to appreciate fully the large scale of the buildings of lower Manhattan. As Lord had written in his biography on the artist, Giacometti “had never set foot in New York and knew nothing about life in the rapidly evolving metropolis. Nor had he ever laid eyes on an actual skyscraper. Moreover, he had a fear of heights, of empty space, of the void. He liked to keep his feet planted firmly on the ground” (J. Lord, op. cit., p. 377). When he finally visited New York in 1965 and saw Chase Manhattan Plaza for the first time, his feelings about the size of his sculptures suddenly changed, and he wanted to make his Grandes femes twenty-five feet tall (se fig 6). Although his brother Diego created an armature for this project, Giacometti died before he could ever complete the work. The Grandes femmes of 1960 thus remained the largest sculptures of his oeuvre and the embodiment of his newfound appreciation of sculptural monumentality.
Of all his sculptures of standing women, Grande femme I is perhaps one of his most dramatic. The figure’s haunting, elongated form, immobilized by large feet that are firmly rooted to their base, towers over the viewer with the permanence and fortitude of a giant tree. “The large scale of these works,” writes Valerie Fletcher, “lends a greater physical presence than that of the earlier works, and their faces have an intense gaze with hollowed sockets fixed unblinkingly on some remote vista or inner-directed goal… the woman’s stare passes over all viewers, so that she seems especially remote and hieratic” (Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966, op. cit., p. 53).
