Alberto Giacometti

Alexander Liberman, New York (acquired from the artist circa 1951)
Loeb-Krugier Gallery, New York
Sidney Elliott Cohn, New York (acquired from the above)
Mr & Mrs Eli Wallach, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York (a gift from the above in 1969)

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Twenty-five New Acquisitions, 1973, no. 3

Brown patina. The position of the figure's left arm appears to be slightly different when compared to the photograph of the plaster model, which may have been the artist's intention. This work is in good condition.
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Exceptionally rare and dramatically proportioned, this unique bronze is one of Giacometti's first significant sculptural evocations of the theme that would dominate his production of the 1950s:  the solitary, standing female figure. Like many avant-garde artists after the liberation, Giacometti was faced with the dilemma of how to do justice to the absurdity, complexity, brutality and aching fragility of life in his art. By paring down the human anatomy to a minimal assemblage of lines and grounding his thin figure solidly on a plinth, the artist presents his own Existentialist meditation on the significance of human existence at one of the most turbulent times of the Modern age. 

Standing at 24cm. high, the present sculpture offers a dramatic commentary on Giacometti's larger aesthetic agenda as a sculptor, which was to reduce the oppressive, infinity of space by punctuating it with form. Femme debout is a compelling example of the disproportionate relationship between negative and positive space and the overwhelming odds in our struggle to understand the mysteries of the universe. 'In space,' the artist once said, 'there is too much.' The great Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre extrapolated on this thesis in an essay published some months before the artist rendered this sculpture: 'Giacometti knows that there is nothing redundant in a living man, because everything there is functional; he knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space; he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority. This attempt may well seem desperate; and Giacometti, I think, two or three times came very near to despair. If, in order to sculpt, it is necessary to cut and then re-sew in this incompressible medium, why, then sculpture is impossible' (J.-P. Sartre, 'The Search For the Absolute', 1948, reprinted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-1990, Oxford & Cambridge, 1992, p. 601).

Fig. 1, The plaster of Figure debout in Giacometti's studio, 1951. Photograph by Michel Sima