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Lot Essay
Conceived in early 1956 in preparation for the twenty-eighth edition of the Biennale di Venezia, Alberto Giacometti’s renowned series of sculptures known as the Femmes de Venise played a significant role in establishing the artist’s fame and reputation as the most important European sculptor of the postwar era. Comprising nine individual, but closely related, standing female figures cast in bronze, this group of works offers an important insight into Giacometti’s artistic process at this time—working organically from a single clay model, he revised and refined the figure repeatedly over the course of several months, allowing him to achieve a succession of powerful new visions of the nude female form. Among the earliest sculptures created as part of this groundbreaking series, Femme de Venise I embodies many of the key tenets and concepts that characterized Giacometti’s visionary project, her statuesque form filled with a rich sense of character and poise.
In 1955 the French government invited Giacometti to exhibit selections from his oeuvre in the main gallery of the state pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which was scheduled to open the following June. The artist had already agreed to a major retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, which would run concurrently with the Biennale, and the prestigious occasion of these dual exhibitions called for a maximum effort from Giacometti, prompting a rush of sustained and feverish activity that lasted through the first half of 1956. While deciding which pieces to include in the Biennale, Giacometti was reluctant to rely too heavily on his older sculptures, which he felt were more suitable for the overview of his career that would take place in Bern. Indeed, as his brother Diego noted, the artist generally preferred to show his very latest sculptures at exhibition: “He was never satisfied with anything and wanted to reject everything, make something better, and only did the work the day before” (quoted in R. Hohl, ed., Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Osfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 154). As a result, Giacometti set to work on a new group of sculptures that would serve as a major and most up-to-date statement of the current direction of his work, settling on one of his favorite leitmotifs—the standing nude woman.
The result was an incredibly focused and sustained exploration of the human figure over the course of several months. Giacometti wanted these new sculptures to be understood as having evolved by means of his exploratory, metamorphosing process. Instead of aiming towards a final and conclusive state, and then settling on a single outcome that would mark the sum of his efforts to that point, he wanted to reveal the very process of making the figures by tracking the evolution of his idea, revealing the changing and varied states his sculptures went through as he worked. Using a single armature, Giacometti reworked the clay figures almost daily, driven by a compulsive sense of refinement and revision, as he relentlessly built up, broke down, and often destroyed his figures-in-progress.
Once he was satisfied with the figure or felt he had achieved a result that interested him the most at that moment, Giacometti would pause in his sculpting, and ask Diego to make a plaster cast of the clay figure. Across the series of the Femmes de Venise, the female standing figure grows, shrinks, is flattened and then rounded, eroded and re-developed, following the artist’s flowing vision, each individual sculpture depending on the destruction of the preceding one. As David Sylvester explained, “the last of the states was no more definitive than its predecessors. All were provisional. And from his point of view, every head and standing figure was a state, hardly more than a means towards doing the next” (Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, p. 85).
James Lord, the artist’s biographer, described the extraordinary dynamism of Giacometti’s approach in these works: “In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor’s fingers coursed over the clay. Not one of these states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea of form, Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement” (op. cit., 1986, pp. 355-356).
The Femmes de Venise sculptures stand at an important moment of transition in Giacometti’s art, serving as a compelling synthesis of his many different inspirations and experiences, particularly regarding his work with the human figure. Having spent much of the Second World War modeling miniscule figures that could fit within a matchbox, the artist had a breakthrough in 1947, when he began to model his iconic, attenuated visions of the human form. These works were created from memory, as the artist sought to reconcile perception and reality in a single sculpture. At the beginning of the following decade, however, Giacometti found that he had exhausted this avenue of aesthetic and expressive creation, and returned to working directly from life, using both his brother Diego, and new wife, Annette, as models. As a result, his depictions of female figures in both his paintings and sculptural work during these years became more individualized. While the hieratic, frontal posture remained, these standing nudes differed from his earlier, more “visionary” works—less a statement of universal humanity, and more a portrayal of a unique person, endowed with a distinct physical presence.
When it came time to create the women for the Biennale, Giacometti wanted to combine these myriad sources in a new way, marrying the insights he had taken from his life studies with an inner vision of his subject. Working principally from memory, he shaped a daily procession of female figures with the spontaneous, instinctual and practiced motions of his skillful hands. By May 1956, Giacometti had followed this progressive way of working to create a total of fifteen individual plaster figures, each one varying in their proportions, details and appearance. He chose to exhibit ten of these at the Venice Biennale in two groups—one of four, and one of six “works in progress.” A further five were shown at his retrospective in Bern, titled there as Figure I through V. The following year, Giacometti selected a total of nine of these plasters—eight from Venice and one from Bern—to cast in bronze, titling them all Femmes de Venise, regardless of the one that had been shown in Switzerland. It was not until 1958 that the group were first displayed together as a contained series, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
The numbering of the nine Femmes de Venise in bronze does not necessarily reflect the specific order in which the plaster models were executed over the course of 1956. It seems likely, however, that Femme de Venise I was completed early, if not first of all, in the sequence. The plaster version of Femme de Venise I, now held in the collection of the Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti in Paris, was among the works shown at the 1956 Biennale, and is visible in an installation photograph of the exhibition at the French Pavilion. Closely related to the preceding series of Nus debouts that had been occupying Giacometti, her figure is the most robustly naturalistic, with pronounced and expressively modeled female features. Beneath broad and powerful shoulders, the natural curves of her torso are elegantly articulated, a gently sinuous line running from her full breasts, through her narrow waist to the slight swell of her stomach and rounded hips. There is a distinct sense of character to the figure, as she gazes in self-absorbed contemplation into the distance, her slightly raised head and powerful stance suggesting a certain resolve and inner strength that is not as apparent in her more impassive sisters. Indeed, while Femmes de Venise II, IV and V are her next closest relatives, none of these figures display such exaggerated contrasts, or to the same degree the sculptor’s apparent pleasure in the pure tactile quality of the surface.
In 1955 the French government invited Giacometti to exhibit selections from his oeuvre in the main gallery of the state pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which was scheduled to open the following June. The artist had already agreed to a major retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, which would run concurrently with the Biennale, and the prestigious occasion of these dual exhibitions called for a maximum effort from Giacometti, prompting a rush of sustained and feverish activity that lasted through the first half of 1956. While deciding which pieces to include in the Biennale, Giacometti was reluctant to rely too heavily on his older sculptures, which he felt were more suitable for the overview of his career that would take place in Bern. Indeed, as his brother Diego noted, the artist generally preferred to show his very latest sculptures at exhibition: “He was never satisfied with anything and wanted to reject everything, make something better, and only did the work the day before” (quoted in R. Hohl, ed., Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures, Osfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 154). As a result, Giacometti set to work on a new group of sculptures that would serve as a major and most up-to-date statement of the current direction of his work, settling on one of his favorite leitmotifs—the standing nude woman.
The result was an incredibly focused and sustained exploration of the human figure over the course of several months. Giacometti wanted these new sculptures to be understood as having evolved by means of his exploratory, metamorphosing process. Instead of aiming towards a final and conclusive state, and then settling on a single outcome that would mark the sum of his efforts to that point, he wanted to reveal the very process of making the figures by tracking the evolution of his idea, revealing the changing and varied states his sculptures went through as he worked. Using a single armature, Giacometti reworked the clay figures almost daily, driven by a compulsive sense of refinement and revision, as he relentlessly built up, broke down, and often destroyed his figures-in-progress.
Once he was satisfied with the figure or felt he had achieved a result that interested him the most at that moment, Giacometti would pause in his sculpting, and ask Diego to make a plaster cast of the clay figure. Across the series of the Femmes de Venise, the female standing figure grows, shrinks, is flattened and then rounded, eroded and re-developed, following the artist’s flowing vision, each individual sculpture depending on the destruction of the preceding one. As David Sylvester explained, “the last of the states was no more definitive than its predecessors. All were provisional. And from his point of view, every head and standing figure was a state, hardly more than a means towards doing the next” (Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, p. 85).
James Lord, the artist’s biographer, described the extraordinary dynamism of Giacometti’s approach in these works: “In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor’s fingers coursed over the clay. Not one of these states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea of form, Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement” (op. cit., 1986, pp. 355-356).
The Femmes de Venise sculptures stand at an important moment of transition in Giacometti’s art, serving as a compelling synthesis of his many different inspirations and experiences, particularly regarding his work with the human figure. Having spent much of the Second World War modeling miniscule figures that could fit within a matchbox, the artist had a breakthrough in 1947, when he began to model his iconic, attenuated visions of the human form. These works were created from memory, as the artist sought to reconcile perception and reality in a single sculpture. At the beginning of the following decade, however, Giacometti found that he had exhausted this avenue of aesthetic and expressive creation, and returned to working directly from life, using both his brother Diego, and new wife, Annette, as models. As a result, his depictions of female figures in both his paintings and sculptural work during these years became more individualized. While the hieratic, frontal posture remained, these standing nudes differed from his earlier, more “visionary” works—less a statement of universal humanity, and more a portrayal of a unique person, endowed with a distinct physical presence.
When it came time to create the women for the Biennale, Giacometti wanted to combine these myriad sources in a new way, marrying the insights he had taken from his life studies with an inner vision of his subject. Working principally from memory, he shaped a daily procession of female figures with the spontaneous, instinctual and practiced motions of his skillful hands. By May 1956, Giacometti had followed this progressive way of working to create a total of fifteen individual plaster figures, each one varying in their proportions, details and appearance. He chose to exhibit ten of these at the Venice Biennale in two groups—one of four, and one of six “works in progress.” A further five were shown at his retrospective in Bern, titled there as Figure I through V. The following year, Giacometti selected a total of nine of these plasters—eight from Venice and one from Bern—to cast in bronze, titling them all Femmes de Venise, regardless of the one that had been shown in Switzerland. It was not until 1958 that the group were first displayed together as a contained series, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
The numbering of the nine Femmes de Venise in bronze does not necessarily reflect the specific order in which the plaster models were executed over the course of 1956. It seems likely, however, that Femme de Venise I was completed early, if not first of all, in the sequence. The plaster version of Femme de Venise I, now held in the collection of the Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti in Paris, was among the works shown at the 1956 Biennale, and is visible in an installation photograph of the exhibition at the French Pavilion. Closely related to the preceding series of Nus debouts that had been occupying Giacometti, her figure is the most robustly naturalistic, with pronounced and expressively modeled female features. Beneath broad and powerful shoulders, the natural curves of her torso are elegantly articulated, a gently sinuous line running from her full breasts, through her narrow waist to the slight swell of her stomach and rounded hips. There is a distinct sense of character to the figure, as she gazes in self-absorbed contemplation into the distance, her slightly raised head and powerful stance suggesting a certain resolve and inner strength that is not as apparent in her more impassive sisters. Indeed, while Femmes de Venise II, IV and V are her next closest relatives, none of these figures display such exaggerated contrasts, or to the same degree the sculptor’s apparent pleasure in the pure tactile quality of the surface.