Conceived in 1956 with the first examples cast in bronze the following year, the present sculpture is number eight in Giacometti's celebrated series of nine standing female nudes, collects ively known as the Femmes de Venise. These standing women are among Giacometti's best known works, praised by many as the artist's most significant contribution not only to the pantheon of modern sculpture but twentieth-century art at large.

While Giacometti’s work had been featured in exhibitions around the world by the mid-1950s, the French State, Giacometti’s home for almost the entirety of his adult life, had yet to sponsor an exhibition of the sculptor’s work. It was long overdue—if not a bit ironic—when “in the autumn of 1955 he received an official invitation to exhibit a selection of his works not in France but in the main gallery of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the following June” (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1985, p. 355). With the Biennale and another exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern both opening in June of 1956 Giacometti set to work producing a selection of fifteen standing female figures. Ten of these plaster figures were exhibited in Venice in groups of four and six as self-proclaimed “works in progress,” meanwhile the remaining five plasters were shown in Bern as Figures I-V. Shortly thereafter, Giacometti selected eight plasters from the Venice Biennale and one from the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition to cast in bronze, calling them collects ively the Femmes de Venise, regardless of where they had been shown (see fig. 1). Within two years, bronzes of these static figures were exhibited in the United States at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1958 (see fig. 2). From this point forward, nearly all major subsequent exhibitions dedicated to Giacometti's evocative works would include at least one of these acclaimed Venetian women.

Jean Genet, Giacometti's favorite living author, provided a sensually-evocative description of these figures in the essay he published in 1957:

Valerie Fletcher details, "Giacometti’s postwar sculptures have roughly modeled surfaces that descend from the late nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic of the sketch—works not overly finished but capturing the spontaneity and personal touch of the artist during the creative process. Extensively developed by Rodin and other early modern sculptors, such active surfaces lend a vitality to the sculptures. Their variegated rhythms and the changing play of light and shade caused by the blobs and recesses of bronze suggest fleeting impressions and give the figures expressive power" (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Alberto Giacometti, 1988-89, p. 42)

James Lord, Giacometti’s biographer, writes about the creation of the Femmes de Venise series 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 his 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 innumerable states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea or form. If pleasantly surprised by the look of what his fingers had done, he would ask Diego to make a plaster cast, the business of a few hours. Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement. That is how the… Women of Venice came into being” (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1985, pp. 355-56).

The Femmes de Venise are direct descendants of the elongated female figures which Giacometti had been working on in the 1940s, such as Femme Leoni and precursors of the larger female figures that he would execute in the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Grande Femme I-IV (see figs. 3-5). Created at the median of this artistic development, the Femmes de Venise serve as the summation of Giacometti's findings in this particular subject. The variations among the nine Femmes, when considered as a group, demonstrate the metamorphoses of Giacometti's vision of the female form. From a technical standpoint, the differences in height and anatomy suggest that their numbering might not reflect the sequence in which Giacometti produced them. Valerie Fletcher has suggested that the nine Femmes were randomly renumbered when the artist selected them from among the original plasters for casting into bronze.

All of the Femmes de Venise display the thin, gaunt proportions for which Giacometti is best known, and about which he commented to Sylvester in 1964: "At one t.mes I wanted to hold on to the volume, and they became so tiny that they used to disappear. After that I wanted to hold on to a certain height, and they became narrow. But this was despite myself and even if I fought against it. And I did fight against it; I tried to make them broader. The more I wanted to make them broader, the narrower they got. But the real explanation is something I don't' know, still don't know. I could only know it through the work that I am going to do" (David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London and New York, 1997, p. 6).

The present sculpture is one of the most powerful and authoritative of the nine bronzes in the series. Of the nine figures, number eight is among the tallest figures of the group and is defined by her commanding presence and elegant solidity, standing adroitly with broad, squared shoulders. These figures, tall and thin as they may be, frontally possess breadth at their shoulders and hips, where each figure’s hands become nearly indistinguishable from her torso. Giacometti explained in conversation to David Sylvester the transformation of his perception into three dimensional form: “If I were to represent in sculpture the perception I have of you, I would make a rather flat, scarcely modeled sculpture. It would be much more like a Cycladic sculpture—looking stylized—than a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which both look real” (reproduced in Exh. Cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg & Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, Alberto Giacometti: The Origins of Space, 2010-11, p. 100). This focus on personal perception as opposed to more realistic depiction is one of the crowning achievements of modern art and Giacometti, perhaps more than any other artist, is the one who brought this focus in being. Giacometti’s struggle with form, scale and condition would inspire future generations of artists working in various sculpture media: from his contemporary Picasso, whose series of bathers also created in 1956 provides a playful counterpoint to the Femmes de Venise, to de Kooning’s tactile bronzes and even to Moore’s magisterial figures.

In its grace and poise, silent majesty and modernity, Femme de Venise VIII is the epit.mes of Giacometti’s mature vision and an enduring presence in his oeuvre. According to the Fondation Giacometti Femme de Venise VIII was cast in an edition of seven bronzes—among the smaller editions of the various Femmes. The present cast, executed in 1973, is one of seven bronzes in the edition, with other casts held in the collects ions of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Alberto Giacometti Stiftung, Zurich, the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. The painted plaster forms part of the collects ion of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.

Giacometti's “Femmes de Venise” and the Evolution of His Standing Women

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