Alberto Giacometti

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist)

Private Collection, New England (acquired from the above in 1966 and until at least 2011)

Private Collection

Femme debout, sans bras is a richly modelled example of one of the most important motifs of Giacometti's art - the standing female figure. Throughout the 1940s and up until his death in 1966, Giacometti created several variations of a lone nude woman, her long, lean body anchored with heavy block feet to a base and frozen in time. In its many sculptural incarnations, this image highlights the dramatic contours of the body and the power of a single gesture. With its multiple and conflicting thematic connotations of stoicism, resilience, passivity, strength and vulnerability, it embodies the Existentialist concerns of many artists and intellectuals working in post-war Paris. 

 

Created in 1958, at the height of Giacometti's international acclaim, the present sculpture followed from the series of Giacometti's Femmes de Venise, which made their debut at the Venice Biennale in 1956. After his success at the Biennale, Giacometti continued to develop the theme of standing female figures, elongating and accentuating the feminine curvature of the body and challenging the limits of the malleability and manipulation of his bronze figures. His exploration of this theme culminated in 1960 with his Grandes femmes, which were intended as part of a project for Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York City.  The present sculpture, created without arms, is an intermediate-variant form of the figure that would ultimately become the symbol of the artist's three-dimensional production.