LONDON.- Rising from the ground like deities, Giacometti’s women have a remarkable presence that capture something of the enduring dignity and grandeur of ancient sculpture. They also have the remoteness and anonymity that speak to the modern age and seem to offer a commentary on the fragile nature of the human condition. Grande figure is a rare, unique sculpture by Alberto Giacometti from the pivotal year of 1947, in which the existential anxiety of the post-war period translates into a raw and expressive female form. Conceived on an impressive scale – at over a metre tall – and coloured in radiant gold, this sculpture marks the beginning of the most significant period in his working life. It was in this crucial year that many of his greatest and most celebrated creations came to life, including L’Homme qui marche and L’Homme au doigt, and the pervasive modernity of these works is particular to the post-war generation’s compulsion to reach a new artistic truth in their work. Exactly seventy years after its conception, Grande figure will be offered with an estimate of £15 – 25 million as part of Sotheby’s London Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 21 June, coinciding with the current Tate Modern retrospective in London.

For Giacometti, the pain of the war came pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and the impact of this on his art cannot be understated. After years of self-imposed exile in his native Switzerland, the artist returned to his spiritual home of Paris in 1945. It had been a period of intense frustration and of destruction as well as creation; he had spent years working an eversmaller scale and when he arrived in Paris he carried an entire three years’ worth of work in six matchboxes. Back in the city that he had loved before the war, the artist’s spirits were buoyed by the discovery of his old studio, preserved by his brother Diego. This new environment and personal contentment heralded not only a period of fruitful productivity, but also a striking change in direction where the style of his mature work was crystallised.

Grande figure brings together Giacometti’s preoccupation with the art of the past, quasiformulaic methodology and relentless focus on the process of creation. Throughout the previous decade, the artist had made regular studies of Egyptian statuary – both in person at the Louvre and working from reproductions – and these became an important source of inspiration. He strongly believed that hieratic forms of ancient sculpture preserved a truthfulness, saying “the works of the past that I find the most true to reality are those that are considered the least, the furthest from it”. Thus, he chose to work as if under the restrictions imposed upon artists in the Egyptian or Byzantine civilisations – notably, the insistence that the pose be formal, compact, impassive and frontal. Yet this did not mean that he was aiming to create an impersonal kind of art and the ‘active’ surfaces of the sculptures are imprints of the gestures that made them. The roughly modelled surface captures the spontaneity and the personal touch of the artist during the creative process – in the vein of the late nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic of the sketch – lending a vibrancy and vitality that is unique to his sculpture. It was through the repetition of these elements that he was able to perceive the elusive reality he sought and achieve a timelessness that spoke to the continuity of the human condition.

This presents an opportunity to acquire one of the earliest examples of the slender, elongated female figures that anticipate Giacometti’s iconic later series of women, including the Femmes de Venise of 1956 – with this sculpture standing as tall as the largest of the Femmes de Venise.