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拍品专文
A sensual and refined image of femininity, Femme qui marche (II) is a pivotal work within Alberto Giacometti’s oeuvre, marking his earliest explorations of one of the most iconic and enduring subjects of his entire career—the standing female nude. Elegantly elongated and filled with a profound sense of vitality, this almost life-size figure is a study in balance and the subtle nuances of gesture and pose. Placing one foot slightly in front of the other, her body tilts gently to one side, introducing a sinuous line that travels through her form and gives the suggestion of forward motion. Unlike the artist’s later representations of the female form, which, with their trembling, vigorously modelled surfaces, are imbued with a constant sense of pulsating energy, Femme qui marche (II) exudes a calm serenity and graceful monumentality, her smooth contours and the purity of her proportions invoking a timeless vision of the human body. Held in the same family collection for the past forty years, the present bronze was originally created by Giacometti as a special gift for his close friend Professor Serafino Corbetta.
Femme qui marche was initially conceived in plaster in early 1932, and appeared for the first time in a drawing Giacometti made of his studio that same year for the Italian aristocrat Donna Madina Gonzaga. Amid the everyday clutter of the artist’s living-come-work space, several important early sculptures are recorded in varying states of progress. Femme qui marche is glimpsed to the left of the scene, tucked behind a small work-table. At this time, the sculpture included a mysterious triangular indentation just below the breasts, perhaps inspired by the plate shaped hollow in an Egyptian sculpture of the god Min of Coptos, which had been illustrated in a 1931 issue of Cahiers d’Art. A year later, Giacometti included a revised version of this sculpture, titled Mannequin, in the Exposition Surréaliste at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris. Installation photographs taken by Man Ray reveal that the artist had transformed the figure with a series of quintessentially Surrealist flourishes—the curling neck of a cello takes the place of the woman’s head, while two long, slender wooden arms were added, extending in an almost comical stretch from her gently sloping shoulders. Giacometti also incorporated feathers and a flower-like object in the place of her hands, positioning the arms so that she appears to be gesturing, directing our attention at some unknown phenomenon.
Giacometti continued to explore the sculpture’s visual potential following the end of this exhibition—in a photograph from the artist’s studio circa 1934, the arms and cello piece were painted black, and at some point the artist also added a base, allowing him to reduce the size and weight of his figure’s feet, while still retaining the slender tapering of the legs. Most importantly, he retained the distinctive placement of the woman’s left foot, as it edges slightly forward. As Yves Bonnefoy has noted, with this subtle choice, Giacometti imbues Femme qui marche with a distinctive power: “There is presence, here, because this woman steps forward firmly towards us, emerging from transcendence as in the art of Egypt or ancient Greece… The fact that this one is ‘walking’ … brings her into the warmth of life… [The sculpture] seems to suggest the dream of an encounter which would help to give meaning to one’s life” (op. cit., 1991, pp. 210-212).
As Bonnefoy highlighted, Giacometti’s depiction of the female figure in Femme qui marche finds echoes in the art of antiquity. During his early years in Paris, the artist was known to spend every Sunday at the Louvre, making use of the free admission policy, and copying the works that impressed him most. The sculptures he discovered in the Egyptian galleries, as well as the prehistoric artefacts from the Cycladic islands and the fragmented figures from ancient Greece and Rome, captivated his imagination, and he returned to them again and again. In Femme qui marche the graceful, stylized figure recalls the monumental, frontally-posed figures of ancient Egyptian funerary figurines, which were designed to perform labors for the dead in the afterlife. Giacometti’s positioning of the feet in particular, recalls the animation of these sculptures, imbuing his female figure with a subtle dynamism.
At the same time, the title of the work, Femme qui marche, has been tied to Giacometti’s concurrent Surrealist interests, invoking Wilhelm Jensen’s famous fictional character, Gradiva. First published in instalments in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Jensen’s story, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, centers on a young archaeologist who became obsessed by a female figure he had discovered in a classical bas-relief. Seen in profile, walking to an unknown destination, this woman is given the Latin name Gradiva—which translates to “she who steps along”—by Jensen’s protagonist and, upon his return to Germany, the young man purchases a copy of the sculpture and hangs it in his workroom. The enigmatic female figure continues to captivate the archaeologist, to the point that she pervades his dreams, causing him to question his understanding of reality. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud famously analyzed the male protagonist in his 1907 essay “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” and both this interpretation, as well as the initial story, with its focus on the mystery of dreams, the subconscious and the idea of l’amour fou, were a source of great fascination in Surrealist circles. Salvador Dalí depicted Gradiva several times in his paintings, as did André Masson, while in 1937 André Breton named his art gallery after the mysterious, spectral character.
While still steeped in Surrealist theory, the mid-1930s marked an important turning point in Giacometti’s style, as the artist found himself inexorably drawn back to the human form, modelling from life. As he later explained, “I knew that one day I would be forced to sit down on a stool before a model and copy what I saw. And with no hope of succeeding. In a way I was afraid to have to start this again, but on the other hand it was unavoidable. I was afraid of it but I had hope. Because the abstract things I was doing then were at an end, once and for all” (quoted in P. Schneider, “Ma longue marche” in L'Express, Paris, no. 521, 8 June 1961, pp. 262-268). This shift in his creative focus led Giacometti into direct conflict with Breton and his fellow Surrealists—at a meeting in February 1935, he was accused of betraying the surrealist spirit with the “aesthetically frivolous and historically redundant” direction of his latest work (J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, London, 1986, p. 154). The sculptor vehemently defended himself and refused to back down, leading to his formal excommunication from the group the following morning. Though he remained in friendly contact with several Surrealists in the aftermath, Giacometti was shocked by the event, and in particular Breton’s lack of understanding regarding his renewed passion for figuration.
Nevertheless, Giacometti agreed to continue exhibiting with the surrealists, and at the opening of The International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in June 1936, the artist was represented by several artworks, including a revised version of Femme qui marche. In the intervening years since the Exposition Surréaliste at the Galerie Pierre Colle, Giacometti had decided to alter the structure of the figure once again, removing the cello element and painting the arms white. Sir Roland Penrose recalled that when the artist arrived in London at the beginning of the show, however, Giacometti felt the need to simplify the figure even further. The sculpture was temporarily withdrawn from view to allow him to rework it, and the artist cut off the long, flowing arms just below the shoulders, essentially returning the sculpture back to its 1932 state (see R. Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate, London, 1981, pp. 276-277).
During the summer of 1936, Pierre Matisse saw a plaster cast of Femme qui marche in Giacometti’s studio and commissioned the artist to make a version for him. Giacometti took the opportunity to modify the sculpture once again, and spent several more months working on the composition, refining the contours, removing the mysterious cavity in the torso, reducing the space between her legs, and remodeling the figure’s back. Most notably, he added a distinct asymmetry to her pose, altering the angle of her shoulders to create a more pronounced slope, enhancing the effect of the sinuous line that runs through her body. This nuanced approach to the distribution of weight within the body was most likely a direct result of Giacometti’s return to studying the human form from life, and imbued the figure with a greater sense of animation. Writing to his mother, Giacometti proclaimed the revised sculpture to be “certainly the best thing I have done thus far,” titling it Femme qui marche (II), and Matisse was delighted by the new approach when the plaster arrived in New York in January 1937 (letter to the artist’s mother, 27 October 1936; quoted in C. Grenier, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography, Paris, 2018, p. 144).
This plaster was purchased from Matisse by Peggy Guggenheim on 15 October 1941, and put on display in her renowned New York gallery, Art of This Century. Guggenheim brought the plaster sculpture back to Europe with her after the Second World War, and included it in the ground-breaking showing of her collection at the Venice Biennale in 1948. La Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, as the exhibition was known, was a defining event within that year’s Biennale—the first time the festival had been staged following the end of the conflict—and featured over seventy individual artists. The collection subsequently toured to Florence and Milan in 1949, bringing an extraordinary, comprehensive survey of avant-garde, abstract and Surrealist art, to Italian audiences. According to Guggenheim’s memoirs, the plaster of Femme qui marche (II) was stopped by customs in Padua on its return journey, and she had to transport it in her own car to Venice, which resulted in slight damage to the figure’s legs. She invited Giacometti to stay with her in her Venetian Palazzo later that year, at which point he repaired the sculpture and also worked on a bronze casting of the piece at the Fonderie Bianchi for Guggenheim’s collection.
In the spring of 1960, Guggenheim commissioned the Fonderie Bianchi to make five more casts of Femme qui marche (II), and a seventh bronze cast (numbered 0) was made for Giacometti the following May 1961, as a special request from the artist. This was the present cast of Femme qui marche (II), created as a gift for Professor Serafino Corbetta, a doctor based just across the Italian border from the Giacometti family home in Switzerland. An ardent collector of contemporary art, Corbetta had filled the walls of his home with works by avant-garde artists including Ben Nicholson, Marino Marini and Giorgio Morandi. He became the personal doctor of Giacometti’s mother Annetta, as well as a close friend of the artist, and amassed an important collection of Giacometti’s works over the years. The artist presented Femme qui marche (II) to the doctor as a gesture of thanks for his dedication to Annetta, and can be seen in several photographs of Corbetta’s house in Chiavenna.
Femme qui marche was initially conceived in plaster in early 1932, and appeared for the first time in a drawing Giacometti made of his studio that same year for the Italian aristocrat Donna Madina Gonzaga. Amid the everyday clutter of the artist’s living-come-work space, several important early sculptures are recorded in varying states of progress. Femme qui marche is glimpsed to the left of the scene, tucked behind a small work-table. At this time, the sculpture included a mysterious triangular indentation just below the breasts, perhaps inspired by the plate shaped hollow in an Egyptian sculpture of the god Min of Coptos, which had been illustrated in a 1931 issue of Cahiers d’Art. A year later, Giacometti included a revised version of this sculpture, titled Mannequin, in the Exposition Surréaliste at the Galerie Pierre Colle in Paris. Installation photographs taken by Man Ray reveal that the artist had transformed the figure with a series of quintessentially Surrealist flourishes—the curling neck of a cello takes the place of the woman’s head, while two long, slender wooden arms were added, extending in an almost comical stretch from her gently sloping shoulders. Giacometti also incorporated feathers and a flower-like object in the place of her hands, positioning the arms so that she appears to be gesturing, directing our attention at some unknown phenomenon.
Giacometti continued to explore the sculpture’s visual potential following the end of this exhibition—in a photograph from the artist’s studio circa 1934, the arms and cello piece were painted black, and at some point the artist also added a base, allowing him to reduce the size and weight of his figure’s feet, while still retaining the slender tapering of the legs. Most importantly, he retained the distinctive placement of the woman’s left foot, as it edges slightly forward. As Yves Bonnefoy has noted, with this subtle choice, Giacometti imbues Femme qui marche with a distinctive power: “There is presence, here, because this woman steps forward firmly towards us, emerging from transcendence as in the art of Egypt or ancient Greece… The fact that this one is ‘walking’ … brings her into the warmth of life… [The sculpture] seems to suggest the dream of an encounter which would help to give meaning to one’s life” (op. cit., 1991, pp. 210-212).
As Bonnefoy highlighted, Giacometti’s depiction of the female figure in Femme qui marche finds echoes in the art of antiquity. During his early years in Paris, the artist was known to spend every Sunday at the Louvre, making use of the free admission policy, and copying the works that impressed him most. The sculptures he discovered in the Egyptian galleries, as well as the prehistoric artefacts from the Cycladic islands and the fragmented figures from ancient Greece and Rome, captivated his imagination, and he returned to them again and again. In Femme qui marche the graceful, stylized figure recalls the monumental, frontally-posed figures of ancient Egyptian funerary figurines, which were designed to perform labors for the dead in the afterlife. Giacometti’s positioning of the feet in particular, recalls the animation of these sculptures, imbuing his female figure with a subtle dynamism.
At the same time, the title of the work, Femme qui marche, has been tied to Giacometti’s concurrent Surrealist interests, invoking Wilhelm Jensen’s famous fictional character, Gradiva. First published in instalments in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Jensen’s story, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, centers on a young archaeologist who became obsessed by a female figure he had discovered in a classical bas-relief. Seen in profile, walking to an unknown destination, this woman is given the Latin name Gradiva—which translates to “she who steps along”—by Jensen’s protagonist and, upon his return to Germany, the young man purchases a copy of the sculpture and hangs it in his workroom. The enigmatic female figure continues to captivate the archaeologist, to the point that she pervades his dreams, causing him to question his understanding of reality. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud famously analyzed the male protagonist in his 1907 essay “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” and both this interpretation, as well as the initial story, with its focus on the mystery of dreams, the subconscious and the idea of l’amour fou, were a source of great fascination in Surrealist circles. Salvador Dalí depicted Gradiva several times in his paintings, as did André Masson, while in 1937 André Breton named his art gallery after the mysterious, spectral character.
While still steeped in Surrealist theory, the mid-1930s marked an important turning point in Giacometti’s style, as the artist found himself inexorably drawn back to the human form, modelling from life. As he later explained, “I knew that one day I would be forced to sit down on a stool before a model and copy what I saw. And with no hope of succeeding. In a way I was afraid to have to start this again, but on the other hand it was unavoidable. I was afraid of it but I had hope. Because the abstract things I was doing then were at an end, once and for all” (quoted in P. Schneider, “Ma longue marche” in L'Express, Paris, no. 521, 8 June 1961, pp. 262-268). This shift in his creative focus led Giacometti into direct conflict with Breton and his fellow Surrealists—at a meeting in February 1935, he was accused of betraying the surrealist spirit with the “aesthetically frivolous and historically redundant” direction of his latest work (J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, London, 1986, p. 154). The sculptor vehemently defended himself and refused to back down, leading to his formal excommunication from the group the following morning. Though he remained in friendly contact with several Surrealists in the aftermath, Giacometti was shocked by the event, and in particular Breton’s lack of understanding regarding his renewed passion for figuration.
Nevertheless, Giacometti agreed to continue exhibiting with the surrealists, and at the opening of The International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in June 1936, the artist was represented by several artworks, including a revised version of Femme qui marche. In the intervening years since the Exposition Surréaliste at the Galerie Pierre Colle, Giacometti had decided to alter the structure of the figure once again, removing the cello element and painting the arms white. Sir Roland Penrose recalled that when the artist arrived in London at the beginning of the show, however, Giacometti felt the need to simplify the figure even further. The sculpture was temporarily withdrawn from view to allow him to rework it, and the artist cut off the long, flowing arms just below the shoulders, essentially returning the sculpture back to its 1932 state (see R. Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate, London, 1981, pp. 276-277).
During the summer of 1936, Pierre Matisse saw a plaster cast of Femme qui marche in Giacometti’s studio and commissioned the artist to make a version for him. Giacometti took the opportunity to modify the sculpture once again, and spent several more months working on the composition, refining the contours, removing the mysterious cavity in the torso, reducing the space between her legs, and remodeling the figure’s back. Most notably, he added a distinct asymmetry to her pose, altering the angle of her shoulders to create a more pronounced slope, enhancing the effect of the sinuous line that runs through her body. This nuanced approach to the distribution of weight within the body was most likely a direct result of Giacometti’s return to studying the human form from life, and imbued the figure with a greater sense of animation. Writing to his mother, Giacometti proclaimed the revised sculpture to be “certainly the best thing I have done thus far,” titling it Femme qui marche (II), and Matisse was delighted by the new approach when the plaster arrived in New York in January 1937 (letter to the artist’s mother, 27 October 1936; quoted in C. Grenier, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography, Paris, 2018, p. 144).
This plaster was purchased from Matisse by Peggy Guggenheim on 15 October 1941, and put on display in her renowned New York gallery, Art of This Century. Guggenheim brought the plaster sculpture back to Europe with her after the Second World War, and included it in the ground-breaking showing of her collection at the Venice Biennale in 1948. La Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, as the exhibition was known, was a defining event within that year’s Biennale—the first time the festival had been staged following the end of the conflict—and featured over seventy individual artists. The collection subsequently toured to Florence and Milan in 1949, bringing an extraordinary, comprehensive survey of avant-garde, abstract and Surrealist art, to Italian audiences. According to Guggenheim’s memoirs, the plaster of Femme qui marche (II) was stopped by customs in Padua on its return journey, and she had to transport it in her own car to Venice, which resulted in slight damage to the figure’s legs. She invited Giacometti to stay with her in her Venetian Palazzo later that year, at which point he repaired the sculpture and also worked on a bronze casting of the piece at the Fonderie Bianchi for Guggenheim’s collection.
In the spring of 1960, Guggenheim commissioned the Fonderie Bianchi to make five more casts of Femme qui marche (II), and a seventh bronze cast (numbered 0) was made for Giacometti the following May 1961, as a special request from the artist. This was the present cast of Femme qui marche (II), created as a gift for Professor Serafino Corbetta, a doctor based just across the Italian border from the Giacometti family home in Switzerland. An ardent collector of contemporary art, Corbetta had filled the walls of his home with works by avant-garde artists including Ben Nicholson, Marino Marini and Giorgio Morandi. He became the personal doctor of Giacometti’s mother Annetta, as well as a close friend of the artist, and amassed an important collection of Giacometti’s works over the years. The artist presented Femme qui marche (II) to the doctor as a gesture of thanks for his dedication to Annetta, and can be seen in several photographs of Corbetta’s house in Chiavenna.