Femme Debout I (Standing Woman I)

Nearly nine feet tall, this larger-than-life, extremely slender figure towers over the viewer. Despite her emaciated frame, she commands the surrounding space. Her rail-thin arms appear almost fused to her torso, heightening a palpable sense of empty space around the figure. The relatively large base emphasizes her fragility. The deeply kneaded, distressed bronze surface suggests a morbid, decomposing form. Alberto Giacometti began creating isolated, skeletal female and male figures in the wake of World War II. At first working on a small scale, he soon began to produce much taller forms like this one. Giacometti conceived this sculpture during the last decade of his life. It was originally intended as one of four female figures that would occupy the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York City. Committed to the idea that art and everyday life should be seamlessly integrated, Giacometti imagined a public stage for his bronze figures where people using the plaza could interact freely with them. Because of Giacometti's dislike for long-distance travel, a model of the plaza was sent to him in Paris. The group of rough, eroded, heavily worked figures was first modeled in plaster and then cast in bronze, but it was never sent to New York. Unsatisfied by the relationship between the sculpture and the site--which he had never visited--Giacometti finally decided to abandon the project, and the figures were sold separately.