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Larger Image |
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Title |
Standing Nude. |
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Alternative Title |
Standing Figure. |
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Creator |
Giacometti, Alberto (Swiss painter, sculptor, and printmaker, 1901-1966) |
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Date |
1955 |
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Cultural Context |
Swiss
European
Western European |
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Style/Period |
Modern (styles and periods) |
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Subject |
Nudes
Women |
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Description |
Pencil drawing; "This drawing, which at nearly three feet in height is very large for Giacometti, is one of an enormous number that he produced throughout his life. His sculptures and paintings of the figure, similarly attenuated, are far better known, but drawing for Giacometti had its own very specific virtues. Here, for instance, parts of the figure have been smudged or erased, reinforcing suggestions of transparency or of shimmering." (Caption, p.72); "The individualist ethics of the 'School of London' were rooted in the reception of existentialist principles from France. These were mainly transmitted to artists through the work of Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss-born sculptor who had been a Surrealist up until the mid-1930s and then converted, dramatically, to working from life. Giacometti's mythical status was founded on legends of his driven persona as much as his anxiety-laden work. Whereas [Henry] Moore's sculpture essentially derived from carving, Giacometti was a modeler who obsessively kneaded and whittled his spindly clay figures until they distilled complex or contradictory spatial apprehensions. His influential interpreter from 1941 onwards, Jean-Paul Sartre, described this process: 'he knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space'. Implicitly questioning the reassuring givens of perspective, Giacometti repeatedly attempted to express the fragile contingency of his perceptual relations to his models, describing, for instance, how a model in his studio 'grew and simultaneously receded to a tremendous distance'. The immobility of the figure in a drawing of 1955, in which lines bind the joints of the body like wire, indicates Giacometti's thinking was also inflected by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Writing much later, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might almost be registering the frozen, hieratic look on this figure's face when, glossing Merleau-Ponty, he describes 'the dependence of the visible on that which places us under the eye of the seer … this seeing to which I am subjected'." (Excerpt, p.72) |
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Material |
Pencils (drawing and writing equipment) |
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Measurements |
63.8 x 48.3 cm |
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Technique |
Drawing (image-making) |
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Work Type |
Drawings
Pencil works
Nudes (representations)
Figure drawings
Female figure drawings |
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Repository |
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia (Norwich, England, United Kingdom) |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.72, fig.35) |
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Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. Photo James Austin. © 1996 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2000. (68/4511) |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 826-40.jpg |
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Rating |
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