Femme debout, sans bras

“They give me this odd feeling: they are familiar, they walk in the street, yet they are in the depths of time, at the source of all being; they keep approaching and retreating in a sovereign immobility. If my gaze attempts to tame them, to approach them, then—but not furiously, not ranting or raging, simply by means of a distance between them and myself that I had not noticed, a distance so compressed and reduced it made them seem quite close—they take their distance and keep it: it is because this distance between them and myself has suddenly unfolded. Where are they going? Although their image remains visible, where are they?” (quoted in E. White, ed., The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, Hopewell, 1993, p. 317). Written following a visit to Alberto Giacometti’s studio in 1957, the writer Jean Genet’s impressions of the artist’s female figures perfectly capture the enigmatic, unknowable quality of these sculptures, icons of his oeuvre.
Conceived in 1958 and featured in the landmark retrospective of the artist held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1974, the strikingly pared down Femme debout, sans bras is one such work. In contrast to their counterparts of the late 1940s, these figures, conceived towards the end of Giacometti’s career, are rendered with undulating silhouettes, which endow them with a heightened sense of physicality and a powerful presence. Here, Giacometti has vigorously modeled the figure, leaving accretions of clay that seem to pool and disperse, imparting a sense of dynamism and flickering life to this hieratic and elusive figure of a woman.
The female figure was one of the most important themes in Giacometti’s art. In many ways this motif culminated in the series of nine individual sculptures, known as the Femmes de Venise, which the artist produced for the 1956 Venice Biennale. After the success and critical acclaim that these works received when they were exhibited, Giacometti continued to explore the motif of the standing woman. At the end of 1958, he began work on a series of large-scale standing female figures, the Grandes femmes, which were intended to be part of a sculptural project that he had been approached to create for the new Chase Manhattan Bank plaza in New York.
In Femme debout, sans bras, Giacometti reduced the human form to its most elemental components. The ascending line, after rising from firmly anchored feet, narrows to a tenuously fragile degree in the figure’s waist, expands slightly to form her upper torso and shoulders, and then culminates in a large and finely formed head. Notwithstanding its austere silhouette and slender masses, the figure is exquisitely balanced between the extremities of head and feet. Giacometti was famous for working up a figure during the course of the day, then undoing almost all of it before retiring for the night, allowing the fundamental essence of a figure to remain as the viable form with which he would commence work the next day. The smaller standing women of this period clearly display the outward signs of just how consuming this relentless process of construction and reduction could become, and openly reveal the intense emotional involvement that must have gone hand in hand with the artist’s compulsive and perfectionist manner of working.
Before Femme debout, sans bras was acquired by the present owner, it was in the famed Chicago collection of Milton D. Ratner. Ratner amassed a large grouping of the artist’s work that encompassed all aspects of his oeuvre, including sculpture, painting, drawing and printmaking. He exhibited his collection of Giacometti works at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1974-1975. Writing about works such as Femme debout, sans bras, Ratner described the effect these works had on the viewer: “The genius of this mature style of Giacometti enables one to relate to each of his individual pieces; the relationship is the one initiated by the artist but left for the observer to finish from his own experience and emotional needs” (Alberto Giacometti: The Milton D. Ratner Family Collection, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1974, p. 13).