Femme Leoni

Conceived in 1947, a breakthrough year in the life of Alberto Giacometti, Femme Leoni is one of the first of the now iconic elongated standing women that the sculptor created. Named after Peggy Guggenheim’s famed Venice home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where a cast resides today, and possibly inspired by the artist’s lover and muse, Isabel Rawsthorne, Femme Leoni dates from this seminal period. During this time, Giacometti conceived a new sculptural idiom that has come to define his career as a new tribe of sculpted figures emerged from his studio, their trembling surfaces bearing every moment of their creation. Part of an extraordinary surge of productivity in preparation for the artist’s first solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York in 1948, this group of sculptures includes what are regarded as some of the masterpieces of Giacometti’s art, including L’homme qui marche, L’homme au doigt, Le Nez, Grande figure, as well as the present work.
Soaring majestically from the ground to a life-size height, works such as Femme Leoni were paradoxically born from a series of minute sculptures of only around two centimeters high. Having returned to figuration at the beginning of the 1930s, from around 1937 Giacometti had begun to mold small figures mounted on large bases. These works had been inspired by a nocturnal vision that he had seen while walking the streets of Paris at night. He caught sight of British-born artist, Isabel Rawsthorne, in the distance, and as he described, “the sculpture I wanted to make of this woman was exactly the vision I had had of her when I saw her in the street, some way off. So I tended to make her the size that she seemed at this distance… “ (quoted in Y. Bonnefoy, op. cit., 1991, p. 272). Giacometti became obsessed with recording this memory as he had seen it, rendering the sense of space that had existed between him and the subject.
When he returned to Paris in 1945 after spending the war in his native Switzerland, Giacometti continued to build on the revelation of his vision of Rawsthorne. His fidelity to reality however meant that he was unable to enlarge his sculpted figures—famously on his return to Paris, all that he had accomplished during his years in self-imposed exile could fit into a matchbox, such was his works’ small stature. A breakthrough finally came one day when he emerged from a cinema. “That day, reality took on a completely new value for me,” Giacometti explained, “it became the unknown, but an enchanted unknown. From that day on, because I had realized the difference between my way of seeing in the street and the way things are seen in photography and film—I wanted to represent what I saw. Only from 1946 have I been able to perceive the distance that allows people to appear as they really are and not in their natural size” (quoted in A. Schneider, ed., op. cit., 1994, p. 65).
Together with the artist’s renewed embrace of drawing, this experience irrevocably altered Giacometti’s sculptural practice. No longer seeking to model an image that corresponded to a memory, he became fixated upon the reproduction of the reality that he could observe in front of him. This was not a mimetic reproduction of reality, but instead a portrayal or a distillation of human presence. “What is important is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject,” he explained (quoted in J. Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, London, 1986, p. 279). In his practice, Giacometti relinquished any preconceived knowledge of the human form, relying on his sense of perception rather than on traditional convention or academic techniques. His figures soared vertically; enlarged and drastically elongated, the clay stretched, modeled and manipulated to its farthest limit as he reduced the human form to its barest components.
With her elegant, attenuated forms, Femme Leoni stands at the genesis of this discovery. David Sylvester has stated that it was Rawsthorne herself who inspired this work, describing it as Giacometti’s “most consummate portrait of Isabel, a standing figure more than six feet high” (Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, p. 149). Born in London in 1912, Rawsthorne (née Nicholas) met Giacometti in 1935. Having studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, she modeled for—and fell in love with—the sculptor Jacob Epstein. After a sell-out exhibition of her work in 1933, she moved to Paris a year later, where, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, she quickly became a central figure of the Left Bank avant-garde. Among her friends were André Derain, for whom she posed, Balthus, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, who is also thought to have painted her a number of times.
Forced to leave Paris in 1940 due to the Nazi Occupation, Rawsthorne returned with her husband, the journalist Sefton Delmer, to London, where she met and befriended Francis Bacon, who would paint her in some of his most important works. She returned to France when the war ended and was briefly reunited with Giacometti. Together, they spent time in Existentialist circles, with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They broke up in 1947—the same year as she divorced her husband—though she and the artist remained friends for the rest of their lives. Returning to London, she married British composer and conductor, Constant Lambert, and began working as a set designer for the Royal Opera House, among other locations. Her final marriage was to composer Alan Rawsthorne in 1951.
Isabel Rawsthorne first met Giacometti at the famed Montparnasse café, Le Dôme. “I had become aware of a curious sensation when being observed with a remarkable intensity by a man with singular features,” she later recalled. “This continued for many days until one evening, as I rose from the table, he rose at the same time. Advancing he said, ‘Would you like to talk?,’ from then on we met daily at 5 o’clock. It was many, many months before he asked me to his studio to pose. I knew already that he had changed my life forever” (quoted in Giacometti, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2017, p. 83).
The two began an intense, turbulent relationship. More than just lover and muse, they shared a similar artistic outlook—as Carol Jacobi has described, “an interest in the phenomenological and existential implications of representing bodies that would become more mainstream after the War” (“Picasso’s portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne" in The Burlington Magazine, September 2017, vol. 159, no. 1374). Rawsthorne’s arrival in the artist’s life came at an important moment during which he was reembracing the figure following his Surrealist phase. Her image became central to Giacometti’s work at this time, reflected in works such as Tête de Isabel (1936, Fondation Giacometti, Paris), and the later version of Femme qui marche II (1936, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), for which it is possible that she modeled (V. Wiesinger, “Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers,” in Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2008, p. 218).
In Femme Leoni, Giacometti conceived a radically new vision of femininity in the post-war era. Exaggeratedly elongated, the female form is nevertheless imbued with a distinct sensuality. Her narrow waist accentuates her softly curving hips and breasts, and, though her hands and arms appear clamped to her thighs, the sinuous gap that is left between her torso and arms emphasizes her feminine silhouette. Jean-Paul Sartre described the compelling dichotomies and multivalent iconographic meanings that the standing women embody, particularly in the context of the Existentialism to which Giacometti’s work is so often regarded, “A complete woman, glimpsed, secretly desired, a woman who passes us by with the strange dignity of a willowy, delicate girl striding carelessly… a complete woman, devoted to us, refused us, near, far; a woman whose exquisite body betrays hidden emaciation, and… conceals a soft, physical roundedness; a complete woman, ever endangered on this earth, and yet already not entirely of this earth; a woman who lives, and who tells us of the astonishing adventure of the flesh, our own adventure” (quoted in A. Schneider, op. cit., 1994, p. 72).
The hieratic, majestic quality of Femme Leoni and her fellow Femmes debout from this time also reflect Giacometti’s interest in the art of the past. During his early years in Paris, the artist was known to have spent every Sunday at the Louvre copying the works that most impressed him, including Egyptian burial figures and archaic Greek korai. These ancient statuettes depict nude women standing rigidly frontal and still, their heads held high with featureless faces save for a stylized nose. These idols exude the same commanding presence as Giacometti’s sculptures, inspiring the a similar sense of awe and reverence.
Giacometti chose not to send Femme Leoni to Pierre Matisse’s New York exhibition of 1948. Instead, as photographs from the 1950s show, the plaster figure remained in the corner of his studio, standing sentinel, watching over the artist and his prolific period of creation for just under a decade. It was not until the mid-1950s that Giacometti returned to this figure. By now renowned the world over, in 1955 the artist received an invitation from the French state to represent the country at the Venice Biennale in June the following year. Scheduled to take place at the same time was the artist’s first retrospective in his native Switzerland, held at the Kunsthalle Bern.
In preparation for the Biennale, from January until May 1956, the artist worked obsessively on what are now known as the Femmes de Venise. With the female form firmly ingrained in his mind, it was at this time that he returned to the standing female figure, Femme Leoni, that had been ever-present in his life, fixing the damage that it had endured over time and reworking the pedestal. Exhibited for the first time in Bern as Figure V, this plaster was shown alongside four of the Femmes de Venise. In Venice, he showed ten other versions. The Bern retrospective presented a survey of the artist’s work to date. Widely acclaimed, this show was a pivotal moment in Giacometti’s career.
After the exhibition ended in July, Giacometti returned once again to modify Femme Leoni, enlarging the figure’s legs, adding feet and reworking the base to make it slanted. This form was typical of his figures of the 1950s, in contrast to the flat base that he used for his sculptures of the preceding decade. Legendary collector and gallerist, Peggy Guggenheim saw the plaster model in Giacometti’s studio in Paris in the autumn of 1957 and commissioned the first bronze cast. From 1959 onwards, Giacometti called this work the Femme Leoni, a testament to Guggenheim and her Venice palazzo. A total of eight bronze casts of Femme Leoni are known to exist. The painted plaster is in the Fondation Giacometti, Paris and one of the bronzes is in the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Femme Leoni was formerly owned by Julian J. Aberbach, best known for being Elvis Presley's music publisher. Together with his wife, Anne Marie, Aberbach collected a large group of modern works of art, including pieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. The sculpture was subsequently acquired by the British publisher and his wife, Sir Edward and Lady Nika Hulton. Together, the couple amassed an extensive collection of twentieth-century art in the years following the Second World War. Born Princess Nika Youriévitch, Lady Nika was the daughter of a Russian Prince Serge Youriévitch, and grew up in Paris. After marrying Sir Edward in 1946, Lady Nika began acquiring modern art, with a particular focus on Paul Klee. In 1957, their collection was shown in an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, followed by museums across Europe, that included works by a host of artists, from Eugene Delacroix and Edgar Degas to Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Jean Dubuffet.