拍品專文
Early in 1956, Giacometti produced a group of fifteen standing female figures in preparation for exhibitions of his work at the Venice Biennale and at the Kunsthalle in Bern, both of which opened in June of that year. Ten of the plaster figures were exhibited in Venice in groups of four and six as "works in progress," and the remaining five plasters were shown in Bern as Figures I-V. Shortly thereafter, Giacometti selected eight plasters from the Biennale and one from the Bern exhibition for casting into bronze, entitling them Femmes de Venise regardless of where they had been shown.
According to David Sylvester, the sculptures were created as different states of the same figure, modeled from a single mass of clay. When Giacometti was satisfied with a particular version, his brother Diego made a plaster cast of it while Giacometti continued to rework the clay into a different figure. As Giacometti told Sylvester, "The last of the states was no more definitive than its predecessors. All were provisional..." (exh. cat., Twentieth Century Modern Masters, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, p. 265) Giacometti's biographer, James Lord, describes the creation of the Femmes de Venise as follows:
Working with the same clay on the same armature, as he often did,
Giacometti concentrated on a single rigidly erect figure of a nude
woman, her body slender, attenuated, head held high, arms and hands pressed to her sides, feet outsized and rooted to the pedestal. She was modeled after a female figure in the mind's eye, not from a living woman. In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor's fingers
coursed compulsively over the clay. Not one of these states was
definitive, because he was not working towards a preconceived idea or form...[his] purpose was not to preserve one state of his
sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. (J. Lord, op. cit., pp. 355-356)
The differences in height and anatomy among the nine Femmes de Venise suggest that their numbering might not even reflect the sequence in which Giacometti produced them. Figures IV and V, with their broad shoulders and naturalistic anatomies, may actually follow Figure I, while the sharp-edged profile and curved hairdo of Figure IX, the present example, most closely resembles that of Figure VI. Dr. Valerie Fletcher has proposed that the nine Femmes de Venise were renumbered when the artist selected them from among the fifteen original plasters for casting into bronze.
All the sculptures in the series, however, display the thin, gaunt proportions for which Giacometti is best known, about which he commented to Sylvester in 1964: "I did fight against it; I tried to make them broader, the narrower they go..." (exh. cat., Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, 1913-1965, Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 6) With their disproportionately small heads and disproportionately large feet, the overall effect of these tall, slender figures is what Lord terms an "ascending vitality." (J. Lord, op. cit., p. 356) Reflecting upon the impression which the Femmes de Venise make upon the viewer, Lord concludes:
When a spectator's attention is fixed upon the head of one of these figures, the lower part of her body would lack verisimilitude were it not planted firmly upon those enormous feet... The eye is obliged to move up and down, up and down, while one's perception of the sculpture as a whole image becomes an instinctual act, spontaneously responding to the force that drove the sculptor's fingers. Comparable to the force of gravity, it kept those massive feet so solidly set on the pedestal that they affirmed the physicality of the figure as the one aspect of his creativity which the artist could absolutely count on, all the rest being subject to the unreliability of the mind's eye. (Ibid., pp. 356-357)
According to David Sylvester, the sculptures were created as different states of the same figure, modeled from a single mass of clay. When Giacometti was satisfied with a particular version, his brother Diego made a plaster cast of it while Giacometti continued to rework the clay into a different figure. As Giacometti told Sylvester, "The last of the states was no more definitive than its predecessors. All were provisional..." (exh. cat., Twentieth Century Modern Masters, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, p. 265) Giacometti's biographer, James Lord, describes the creation of the Femmes de Venise as follows:
Working with the same clay on the same armature, as he often did,
Giacometti concentrated on a single rigidly erect figure of a nude
woman, her body slender, attenuated, head held high, arms and hands pressed to her sides, feet outsized and rooted to the pedestal. She was modeled after a female figure in the mind's eye, not from a living woman. In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor's fingers
coursed compulsively over the clay. Not one of these states was
definitive, because he was not working towards a preconceived idea or form...[his] purpose was not to preserve one state of his
sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. (J. Lord, op. cit., pp. 355-356)
The differences in height and anatomy among the nine Femmes de Venise suggest that their numbering might not even reflect the sequence in which Giacometti produced them. Figures IV and V, with their broad shoulders and naturalistic anatomies, may actually follow Figure I, while the sharp-edged profile and curved hairdo of Figure IX, the present example, most closely resembles that of Figure VI. Dr. Valerie Fletcher has proposed that the nine Femmes de Venise were renumbered when the artist selected them from among the fifteen original plasters for casting into bronze.
All the sculptures in the series, however, display the thin, gaunt proportions for which Giacometti is best known, about which he commented to Sylvester in 1964: "I did fight against it; I tried to make them broader, the narrower they go..." (exh. cat., Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, 1913-1965, Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 6) With their disproportionately small heads and disproportionately large feet, the overall effect of these tall, slender figures is what Lord terms an "ascending vitality." (J. Lord, op. cit., p. 356) Reflecting upon the impression which the Femmes de Venise make upon the viewer, Lord concludes:
When a spectator's attention is fixed upon the head of one of these figures, the lower part of her body would lack verisimilitude were it not planted firmly upon those enormous feet... The eye is obliged to move up and down, up and down, while one's perception of the sculpture as a whole image becomes an instinctual act, spontaneously responding to the force that drove the sculptor's fingers. Comparable to the force of gravity, it kept those massive feet so solidly set on the pedestal that they affirmed the physicality of the figure as the one aspect of his creativity which the artist could absolutely count on, all the rest being subject to the unreliability of the mind's eye. (Ibid., pp. 356-357)