Alberto Giacometti is recognized as the most important sculptor of the twentieth century. More than any other artist his craggy, emaciated figures, lithe with energy yet eternal in their stasis have come to symbolize the human condition. From his earliest days working alongside his father Giovanni Giacometti in Italian-speaking Switzerland to his engagement with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s to his self-imposed exile in Geneva for much of World War II, Giacometti was a man possessed by an urge to create and a man never entirely satisfied with his creations. His return to Paris shortly after the end of the war would not put an end to these aspects of his work but did herald the beginning of a new style—one that would fundamentally change the history of art. Femme Leoni, of 1947 is a masterpiece of Giacometti’s post-war artistic production and one of the first tall, static female sculptures that, along with L’Homme qui marche, would come to symbolize Giacometti’s work for the remainder of his life (see fig. 1).
The year 1947 was of crucial importance for Giacometti and many of his most celebrated creations such as Tête sur tige, L’Homme au doigt, Le Main and Le Nez date from that period (see fig. 2). After years of self-imposed exile in his native Switzerland, in 1945 the artist had returned to his spiritual home, Paris. He had spent the preceding years working on an ever-smaller scale as he attempted to render the perspective of distance in sculptural form. It was a period of intense frustration and of destruction as well as creation; when he arrived in Paris he carried an entire three years’ worth of work in six match boxes. Back in the city he had so loved before the war, his spirits were buoyed by the discovery that his old studio was just as he had left it some three years prior, carefully preserved by his brother Diego. The two brothers soon took up their old routines, with Alberto rising at midday and then working late into the night before going out to one of the cafés or bars that he had frequented before the war.
“In 1947,” writes David Sylvester, “he completed several figures which were life size or near life size as to their height and often as to their breadth until he started paring them down, leaving slag-heaps of plaster on the studio floor. They included the standing figure about five feet tall and called the Lion-woman, which is his most consummate portrait of Isabel [Rawsthorne, the present work], a standing figure more than six feet high, his first life-size Man pointing, and the Hand, and the Nose, and the Head on a Rod. They style of his mature work was crystallized, a style deriving above all from the Egyptians—for example, in the hunched shoulders of the women (especially reminiscent of pre-dynastic ivories) and in the way a walking man advances one leg as if discovering the act of walking” (David Syvlester, Looking at Giacometti, New York, 1994, pp. 98-99; see fig. 3).
Giacometti’s energy was further rejuvenated by the arrival in Paris of Isabel Rawsthorne—who was briefly his lover and would later become Francis Bacon’s friend and muse—and then with the arrival of Annette Arm in the summer of 1946. Born in London's East End in 1912, Isabel Nicholas studied at Liverpool Art School before briefly attending the Royal Academy in London. As a young woman she lived with and modeled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose Isabel of 1933 communes a hypnotic sexual allure. In 1934 she moved to Paris and started modeling for André Derain and Alberto Giacometti, living with Giacometti for several months. His sculptures of her bear witness to a statuesque composure and almost celestial assuredness. She also befriended the poet Michel Leiris, who was the son-in-law of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso's famous patron. Her first marriage was to Sefton Delmer, a war correspondent for the Daily Express and together they reported on the Spanish Civil War. Having divorced Delmer after the Second World War, she married the composer and conductor Constant Lambert. She had her first major solo exhibition in 1949 at the Hanover Gallery, where Bacon also exhibited, after which she designed stage sets, including at the Royal Opera House in 1953. Lambert had died in 1951 and in 1954 she married his friend, the composer Alan Rawsthorne. During the '50s and '60s she mixed in Soho circles along with Bacon at Muriel Belcher's "Colony Room" drinking club and "The George" pub. She became one of Bacon’s enduring muses and featured in a number of his powerful, gestural paintings (see fig. 4).
Both Giacometti and Bacon used their preferred medium of choice to encapsulate Rawsthorne’s essence. Giacometti’s sculptures, however, were not just a response to the physiognomy of a particular muse. The standing woman and the walking man would form the two most important counterpoints of Giacometti’s mature oeuvre. Femme Leoni was one of the first of the former: “The year 1947 was a wondrously productive one for Giacometti.… dominating all the rest [of his sculptures] were those slender, large-footed women. Fresh from the sculptor’s hands, they must have looked very mysterious. Though vaguely reminiscent of certain Etruscan figures, they are not derived from them, being far closer in spirit to Egyptian deities. The great religious art of the world has always been concerned with the female principle, and its masterpieces are possessed by a profound stillness. They do not stir or strive. They simply art. The law of their being is to do nothing but be. Giacometti's sculptures live by the same law. In ancient Egypt, a sculptor was called ‘one who keeps alive.’ His works were created to represent the idea of eternity, detaching both past and future from the flux of t.mes . They were ‘true’ to life in order to reveal the ‘falsehood’ of death. They made no comment on the how or why of human circumstances but only on the t.mes less and empirical what. The same may be said of Giacometti’s women” (James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography, New York, 1985, p. 283).
Femme Leoni relates closely to other tall figures of 1947 including Grande figure. These tall figures from the late 1940s were the direct precedent for Giacometti’s well known Femme de Venise sculptures of the mid-1950s and his four Grande Figure of 1960 (see fig. 5). Femme Leoni, when the plaster was first exhibited in Bern in 1956, was in fact grouped “alongside four similar but much later plaster sculptures from the series which subsequently became known as the Women of Venice figures” (Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, op. cit., p. 159). In the fall of 1957, Peggy Guggenheim saw the plaster of the present work in Giacometti’s studio and commissioned the first bronze cast, which was made in November of that same year. Giacometti reworked the feet of the plaster in order to create a more stable base prior to the work being cast in bronze. For Peggy Guggenheim, 1947 too brought significant change—this was the year she moved into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, now the home of her eponymous museum. In honor of the first cast’s new home, Giacometti formally titled the work Femme Leoni.
Eight bronzes of this work were cast by the Susse Foundry between 1957 and 1965. Of these casts the first bronze, unnumbered, is held in the Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, Venice and another cast in the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence while the painted plaster forms part of the Fondation Giacometti, Paris’s collects ion. Of the eight bronzes, three casts stand solely on a single base. According to the Foundation Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti added the second base to the sculpture between 1957-58.
The present work bears a distinguished provenance. A gift from Giacometti to noted Art Historian and Museum Director Franz Meyer, this bronze remained with Meyer’s family for decades. Meyer married Ida Chagall, the daughter of artist Marc Chagall, whose monograph he authored. During his tenure at the Kunsthalle, Bern, where he was the director from 1955 to 1961 he oversaw Alberto Giacometti’s solo exhibition in 1956. Upon leaving his position in Bern, he became the director of the Kunsmuseum Basel from 1962 to 1980 and later became the president of the Alberto Giacometti Stiftung in Zurich from 1990 to 1995. Throughout the course of his career he championed contemporary artists and worked diligently to expand numerous museums and public collects
ions’ holdings of a broad range of artists.