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Lot Essay
In Femme debout, Giacometti appears to have built up and then whittled down to its barest core the very essence of the universal woman. During the early 1950s, when Femme debout was initially conceived, Giacometti exclusively used the same two models for his sculptures-- his brother Diego for the men, his wife Annette for the women. As in the tradition of the ancient kouros and kore, Diego was depicted as striding, Annette motionless. These became existential archetypes for mankind in the Post-War world, and prompted Giacometti's friend Jean-Paul Sartre to describe them as 'fine and slender natures [that] rise up to heaven... they are made of the same rarified matter as the glorious bodies that were promised us' (J.-P. Sartre,'The Search for the Absolute', pp. 599-604, Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison & P. Wood, Oxford, 1997, p. 604).
In Femme debout, the figure is shown as a narrow, blade-like entity, piercing space and dominating it. At the same time, its elongated appearance lends the impression that the Femme debout has somehow been squashed by the pressure of reality itself. This is emphasised by the surface of the sculpture, which has a bobbled, tactile quality that also blurs the outlines, meaning that Femme debout has a shimmering, mysterious edge. She is a solid yet ephemeral apparition, both defining and defined by the space around her.
This paradox, of a person both dominating and being compressed by space, was reflected even in the process of execution: Giacometti would build up the figure, and then would remove more and more of the form in a blur of frenzied activity during which his fingers would reportedly move so fast that they were almost invisible. By the early 1950s, Giacometti had managed to control his whittling-- earlier, he had been beset by problems in trying to render people in a manner that provided an equivalent for his own literal vision, trying to emphasise the space and distance that separated the figures from the sculptor or the viewer. This had come to an extreme when he found that an entire exhibition's-worth of his works fitted into a matchbox, so reduced were they. In 1946 he found a solution in the vertical sculptures such as Femme debout with which he is now best associated. Here, the figure of the woman appears to have been constructed from some fundamental essence of existence, as though Giacometti has managed to distil reality, condensing it in order to harness the true form of the woman. Material yet immaterial, this solid, textured figure remains motionless, distant, unapproachable and ultimately ungraspable.
In Femme debout, the figure is shown as a narrow, blade-like entity, piercing space and dominating it. At the same time, its elongated appearance lends the impression that the Femme debout has somehow been squashed by the pressure of reality itself. This is emphasised by the surface of the sculpture, which has a bobbled, tactile quality that also blurs the outlines, meaning that Femme debout has a shimmering, mysterious edge. She is a solid yet ephemeral apparition, both defining and defined by the space around her.
This paradox, of a person both dominating and being compressed by space, was reflected even in the process of execution: Giacometti would build up the figure, and then would remove more and more of the form in a blur of frenzied activity during which his fingers would reportedly move so fast that they were almost invisible. By the early 1950s, Giacometti had managed to control his whittling-- earlier, he had been beset by problems in trying to render people in a manner that provided an equivalent for his own literal vision, trying to emphasise the space and distance that separated the figures from the sculptor or the viewer. This had come to an extreme when he found that an entire exhibition's-worth of his works fitted into a matchbox, so reduced were they. In 1946 he found a solution in the vertical sculptures such as Femme debout with which he is now best associated. Here, the figure of the woman appears to have been constructed from some fundamental essence of existence, as though Giacometti has managed to distil reality, condensing it in order to harness the true form of the woman. Material yet immaterial, this solid, textured figure remains motionless, distant, unapproachable and ultimately ungraspable.