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Artist or Maker: Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

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Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owners, 18 October 1960.

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Literature: Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Paris, 1991, p. 336, no. 309 (another cast illustrated).
A. Schneider, Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, New York, 1994, no. 50 (another cast illustrated).

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Notes: A Life Well Lived: The Ruth and Harvey Kaplan Collection

It was my privilege to know Ruth Kaplan during her lifetime. For me, Ruth and Harvey Kaplan were part and parcel of that great generation of Chicagoans whose lives, both public and personal, defined a generation. They and their circle were civic, cultural and business leaders of a city which their forward thinking helped define. The great Mies van der Rohe follower and society architect Samuel Marx designed and decorated their first home. It was Marx, a board member of both The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who helped them to begin to appreciate art; an appreciation which would result, years later, in a very private but world-class collection. During this time, they worked with such legendary dealers as Paul Rosenberg, buying Claude Monet's Le bassin de Nymphéas in 1956 for a princely sum of $31,500, Martin Jennings at M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., (Rufino Tamayo's
Dicusion Acalorade) and Sam Salz Inc., (Claude Monet's La grève Fécamp).

Katherine Kuh, The Art Institute of Chicago's first Curator of Modern
Painting and Sculpture, served as a consultant to the Kaplans in 1959-1960. Kuh opened up to them a new and younger group of artists and dealers; Sam Kootz (Giorgio Cavallon's Untitled), Fairweather
Hardin Gallery (Philip Guston's The Street, a bold purchase) and
Pierre Matisse from who they bought two Giacomettis; the extraordinary Femme Leoni and Portrait de Diego.

They bought pictures from their friend and business acquaintance Leigh Block, acquiring George Rouault's Carlotta. Block, one of Chicago's greatest collectors, whose legendary collection is on view in Chicago at both the Mary & Leigh Block Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago. Block was in the steel business, as was Harvey Kaplan, the industry which built and sustained Chicago for so many decades.

What is clear in all of their correspondence with dealers, advisors and curators is that they bought above all with their heart, and they gave back to the city which they grew up in and loved. When Ruth passed
away, The Art Institute of Chicago was given the wonderful Le bassin de Nymphéas which she and Harvey had always wanted the public to enjoy.

Ruth and Harvey Kaplan were quiet about their collecting. While their
Guston was often requested for exhibitions by institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, they rarely wanted to be without their pictures
for lengthy periods. It is my pleasure to be able to share with today's collectors a small glimpse of these extraordinary people and the milieu in which they lived.

Amy Gold
Chairman's Office, Christie's New York

Photography of Ruth and Harvey Kaplan (Barcode 23548671)

Property from the Collection of Ruth and Harvey Kaplan
R
It has been said that " a person writes their own eulogy while they are living". My grandma Ruth lived the fullest and most fabulous life imaginable. For almost 95 years, her generosity, strength, and loving nature made the lives of those around her better. Her passing marks the end of an era in our family. She was the last of a larger than life generation, consisting of 10 brothers and sisters, and their spouses. For this generation, family was the center of all activities. They worked together, ate together, and hung out together. No one carried out the traditions of a close knit family better than Grandma, and that is one of the many reasons that my family will always think of her as our matriarch.

Even from my earliest recollections, Grandma led a charmed life. She was gladly doted on and taken care of at every turn. I used to wonder why, but eventually I realized that Grandma had a unique way of ingratiating herself with anyone she came into contact with. She was quite beautiful in her day, but it was her outgoing personality and her cuteness that attracted people to her. She was also very colorful and could put anyone at ease with her vivaciousness and her little eccentricities. I fondly remember that whenever Grandma entered a room of people, she would yell out yoo-hoo when spotting a family member or friend. The room would quickly fill up with laughter, as
Grandma thoroughly enjoyed being the center of attention.

No one loved and adored Ruth more than her husband, my late grandfather Harvey. They were " partners in crime", always on the same team in all facets of life. They were socialites who never missed the crystal balls and events of the times. They traveled the world for both business and pleasure. Grandma was an integral part of the entertainment necessary to promote impeccable customer relationships in our family scrap iron business. Lastly, and most apropos for my writing, was their shared love of art and culture. Back in the 1950's, they together enlisted the help of Katherine Kuh, the curator at The Art Institute of Chicago, to facilitate in the building of a distinct art collection. My grandparents appreciated the beauty of art, and for both of them, art became an important part of how they defined themselves in the high society they lived in. Although Harvey died in the early 1960's, my Grandma, right up until her last breath, never lost sight of the special collection that she and the love of her life created, and I'm sure thought of her beloved Harvey every time she glanced at one of her masterpieces. She enjoyed their collection to the end, and followed Harvey's wish that The Art Institute of Chicago receive Claude Monet's Le basin aux nympheas for the public to enjoy in posterity.
Grandma and I always shared a special bond. Whether it was that I was named after her father, or that I relied on her so much in my younger years, she was my anchor, my confidant, and a bright light in my life. There are so many great and funny stories to tell. I grew up in the same apartment building as Grandma lived. My sister, my cousins, and I were in and out of that apartment constantly. For me, this exquisite apartment was a gymnasium, a driving range, a short order restaurant, and a 5 star hotel. Between my Uncle Alan hitting wiffle golf balls off the walls, and my games of bombardment and baseball, its amazing nothing was ever broken. Grandma always went with the flow. She would cook food at all hours of the day and night, and always entertain my friends for sleepovers.

If art, culture, and living the good life were Grandma's appetizers, her family was always her main course. Her parents and sisters always were an important part of her extended family. She adored her three children, but really had a soft spot for her 8 grandchildren and her 8 great grandchildren. She would do anything to make her grandchildren happy. What a stroke of luck for all these kids to have known Grandma Ruff, as they affectionately called her, for so long. For myself and all the grandchildren, we can look back on her life with the most positive of feelings.

For all of us, Grandma's legacy will live on forever. The way she revered her wonderful art collection parallels how she nurtured and loved her family and everyone one else that was a part of her life. We will miss her often wacky routines and her sometimes outrageous anecdotes, but we will have many poignant memories, and heartwarming stories to tell for generations to come. I owe her a great deal and she will always occupy a special place in my heart. I am fortunate to be able to tell a small portion of her impactful story.

The Comité Giacometti confirms the authenticity of this sculpture. It will be included in the catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti.

The year 1947 was pivotal in Giacometti's career. After several frustrating years in which he found himself capable of sculpting only the most diminutive figures, sometimes no more than a few inches high, he succeeded in 1947 in producing an impressive series of life-sized and over-life-sized compositions (fig. 1). He also sculpted his earliest monumental interpretations of two themes that would preoccupy him throughout the remainder of his life: the standing woman and the walking man. Finally, after exhibiting almost nothing for nearly a decade, Giacometti attracted the attention of the dealer Pierre Matisse, who offered him a one-man show at his New York gallery in January 1948. In his biography of the artist, James Lord has written,
"The year 1947 was a wondrously productive one for Giacometti. He made several life-size sculptures of women, one of a man walking, another of a man pointing, both also life-size, a quantity of smaller figures, some busts on pedestals, a head of a man with his mouth open stuck onto a road, a grotesque sculpture of a small grimacing head, with an extravagantly elongated nose, suspended inside a cage, as well as numerous paintings, portraits of Diego and of his mother, plus studies of heads related to the busts and, as usual henceforth, a quantity of drawings. When the end of the year approached, Matisse came to select works for the New York exhibition. There were plenty. Dominating all the rest were those slender, large-footed women" (Giacometti: A Biography, New York, 1983, p. 283).

The present sculpture, Femme Leoni, is one of the most important works from this watershed year, exemplifying the gaunt, elongated proportions that would become the hallmark of Giacometti's post-war oeuvre. As early as 1959, critics proposed that Giacometti had intended these fragile and emaciated figures to express the alienation and instability of the modern age. The artist himself, however, vigorously denied such Existentialist readings of his work. Instead, he explained the distinctive proportions of his post-war sculptures as a means of rendering the human body not as he knew it to be but as he actually saw it--that is, at a distance. A figure viewed from afar, he argued, appears pronouncedly thin and as a consequence relatively tall. He criticized both Rodin and Houdon for sculpting naturalistically proportioned figures, and claimed, "The works that I find the most true to reality are those that are considered the least" (quoted in M. Matter, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1987, p. 211). Giacometti dated this fascination with the structural conditions of vision to a particular day in 1945: "That day, reality took on a completely new value for me; 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, op. cit., p. 65).

Paradoxically, the illusion of distance that informs Giacometti's post-war figures almost always coexists with a palpable sense of materiality. In the present work, the elongated feet and sturdy base anchor the figure firmly to the ground, while the craggy and furrowed handling suggests a surface seen from extremely close up. Beyond this phenomenological function, Giacometti's irregular modeling also imbues his figures with a disturbing expressive power, the ridges and troughs of bronze evoking the craters and scars of wounded flesh. Valerie Fletcher has written, "While Giacometti's post-war works were not created either as deliberate images of humanity brutalized by the socio-political events of the era or as images of Existentialist angst, neither can they be entirely dissociated from their context" (in Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966, exh. cat., Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 42).

Sculptures such as Femme Leoni also possess an undeniable erotic charge. The protuberant breasts and rounded hips endow the figures with an element of frank sexuality, while their cracked and striated surfaces again suggest ravaged flesh. Moreover, the figures appear fixed and immobile, passive objects of male scrutiny. Indeed, Giacometti recalled that one of his sculptures from 1950, Quatre figurines sur base, had been prompted by the sight of four women at Le Sphinx, one of the most famous brothels in Montparnasse: "Several naked women seen at the Sphinx while I was seated at the end of the room. The distance which separated us (the polished floor) which seemed to me impassable in spite of my desire to cross it, impressed me as much as the women" (quoted in Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1996, p. 165). The distinctive coiffure of Femme Leoni has suggested to scholars that the sculpture was based from memory on Isabel Delmer, a British beauty and artist's model with whom Giacometti lived briefly after the war; she left him on Christmas Day of 1945 for a musician and composer named René Leibowitz.

Another possible source of inspiration for works such as Femme Leoni is the art of antiquity. During his early years in Paris, the artist is known to have spent every Sunday at the Louvre, when admission was free, copying the works that impressed him most, including Egyptian burial figures and archaic Greek korai. Particularly striking is the affinity between Giacometti's standing women and marble statuettes from the Cyclades, probably fertility figurines. The statuettes depict nude women standing rigidly frontal, their heads held high. Their faces are featureless except for a stylized nose, their sex is emphasized by an incised V, and their feet are narrow and elongated. Although thin and fragile in profile, the idols exude a hieratic and commanding presence that seems to imbue Giacometti's waif-like sculptures as well. The artist himself explicitly acknowledged the tension in his work between the woman as an object of devotion and an object of desire: "When I am walking in the street and see a whore from a distance, all dressed, I see a whore. When she is in the room and naked before me, I see a goddess" (quoted in ibid., p. 227).

The plaster version of Femme Leoni was first exhibited at an important retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1956. It was displayed alongside four similar but much later female figures, from the series that would subsequently become known as the Femmes de Venise. The five sculptures were titled Figure I-V in the exhibition catalogue and were all dated 1956 (the correct date for the Femmes de Venise). Photographs of the installation reveal that the present work originally had very slender legs and no feet, with the ankles simply tapering into the socle. Giacometti appears to have re-worked the sculpture after the Bern exhibition closed in July 1956 and before the first bronze cast was made in November 1957. A photograph of the artist's studio in 1957 shows the plaster in an intermediate state, with small feet and a tall, square plinth. The plaster is also very battered, suggesting that Giacometti may have altered the composition to prevent damage during the casting process. The modifications undertaken in 1957 are also consistent with the style of the contemporary Femmes de Venise. In its final version, Femme Leoni has the wedge-shaped base typical of Giacometti's figures from the 1950s, in contrast to the flat base that he used for his sculptures in 1947-1948.

The first bronze cast of Femme Leoni was commissioned in 1957 by Peggy Guggenheim, who saw the plaster in Giacometti's studio during the autumn of that year. The title of the work refers to Guggenheim's Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, which now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. A total of eight bronze casts of Femme Leoni are known to exist. The present example was cast before October 1960 and was sold directly to the collector Harvey Kaplan via Pierre Matisse (fig. 2). It has remained in Kaplan's collection ever since.

(fig. 1) Sculptures in Giacometti's studio, circa 1948. Barcode 23669475

(fig. 2) Letter from Giacometti's dealer, Pierre Matisse, to the owner of the present sculpture, 1960.Barcode 23671034