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Lot Essay
Executed in 1947, Femme debout (recto); Tête et buste de Tériade (verso) dates from a breakthrough year in the life and career of Alberto Giacometti. It was at this time that the artist’s now iconic elongated, hauntingly enigmatic male and female sculpted figures began to emerge from his studio. Considered an annus mirabilis, this year saw him create some of his greatest masterpieces; works such as L’homme qui marche, L’homme au doight and Le nez which have come to mark the beginning of his mature period. Alongside the conception of this new sculptural practice, Giacometti produced a prolific body of drawings and works on paper. Regarded as one of the earliest and finest in a large and important series of standing figure drawings from the late 1940s, Femme debout resonates with a powerful and dramatic intensity: the faceless female figure has an eerie, strangely powerful presence, emerging from the white paper in a web of pencil lines, like a ghostly apparition or a fleeting vision, framed by faint, barely visible outlines. With her limbs pressed tightly together and her rigidly frontal pose, the female figure in the present work is instantly reminiscent of the concurrent standing female sculptures. On the verso of this work are two sketches of a male figure: the head and bust of the famed publisher and art critic Tériade. Above these drawings, Giacometti has inscribed the name John Hewitt – a collector and dealer who was the first owner of this work when he acquired it from the artist in 1955. Included in a number of notable retrospectives of the artist across Europe, Femme debout (recto); Tête et buste de Tériade (verso) encapsulates Giacometti’s innovative and highly distinctive artistic practice across mediums.
Giacometti claimed that it was the medium of drawing that enabled him to move away from the small figures that he had been modelling throughout the war and start to create the renowned large and imposing figures that define his post-war practice. In his desire to distil in pictorial form the very essence of human presence, Giacometti studied the human form with a fervent intensity. It was through the freedom that the medium of drawing offered the artist that, as Yves Bonnefoy has explained, ‘Giacometti learned…to express the weightlessness, the essential lightness of what is alive or is associated with life’ (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, p. 312). Bonnefoy continued, stating that Giacometti discovered that it was, ‘possible to bring out from the underlying luminous whiteness of the page a few lines of force which, converging on nodal points, reconstruct and reveal the way a human being stands upright’ (Bonnefoy, ibid., p. 310).
Giacometti claimed that it was the medium of drawing that enabled him to move away from the small figures that he had been modelling throughout the war and start to create the renowned large and imposing figures that define his post-war practice. In his desire to distil in pictorial form the very essence of human presence, Giacometti studied the human form with a fervent intensity. It was through the freedom that the medium of drawing offered the artist that, as Yves Bonnefoy has explained, ‘Giacometti learned…to express the weightlessness, the essential lightness of what is alive or is associated with life’ (Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, p. 312). Bonnefoy continued, stating that Giacometti discovered that it was, ‘possible to bring out from the underlying luminous whiteness of the page a few lines of force which, converging on nodal points, reconstruct and reveal the way a human being stands upright’ (Bonnefoy, ibid., p. 310).