Alberto Giacometti is best known for his sculptures of elongated figures that he made in the period after the Second World War until his death in 1966. Often associ­ated with a sense of anxiety and isolation in modern life, these inscrutable stick-like men and women are to be found in many collections of modern art across the world. This sculpture of a murdered woman is from a very different, earlier phase in Giacometti’s work when he associated with the surrealist movement in Paris in the first half of the 1930s. Its dark and cruel character appears in several works from these years in which he explored themes of sex and violence, creating objects that give disturbing form to the fears and urges of the subconscious.

The son of Giovanni Giacometti, an accomplished post-impressionist painter, Alberto was born in Borgonovo, a village near Stampa in Italian-speaking Switzerland. After training in Geneva, he moved to Paris in 1922 where he enrolled in the teaching studio of the sculptor Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, a pupil of Auguste Rodin. Giacometti’s early, figurative work gave way in about 1925 to experiments with forms influenced by both Cubism and an interest in tribal art. By the end of the decade he was close to surrealist circles and his sculptures had evolved into enigmatic objects, abstract in form yet loosely suggestive of anatomical parts. Often these objects carry an erotic charge yet remain ambiguous in their ability to both attract and simultaneously disturb the spectator.

Our sculpture had a complex evolution over a number of years, and there are several related sculptures and drawings by Giacometti that explore recumbent and distorted female forms. He eventually  created the plaster model of Woman with her Throat Cut in 1932 and it was later cast in five bronze versions between 1940 and 1949. The sculpture was designed to be placed on the ground and looked at from above, suggesting both a crime scene and a potential man-trap into which the unwary viewer might stumble. The violated female body is evoked with a series of schematic shapes, as much insect-like as human in appearance. A jagged shell-like shape lies exposed like a broken exoskeleton. One arm ends in a giant spoon-like hand, the other flails over the exposed neck. Giacometti mounted this hand on a swivel mechanism so that it could be positioned at different angles, indicating that this represented the helpless state of the victim. Her splayed legs and torso arch in an ambiguous movement that combines the throes of death with a suggestion of sexual fulfilment. Gradually, however, we become aware of the most macabre detail, the small nick in the woman’s windpipe.

Numerous sources of inspiration have been suggested for Woman with her Throat Cut ranging from the artist’s own accounts of his disturbing nightmares to a short story about Jack the Ripper written by one of the artist’s friends. The sculpture is frequently compared to a female praying mantis who is known (in captivity at least) to devour the male during or after copu­lation. This insect exercised a particular fascination for the Surrealists as part of their preoccupation with themes of sexual violence. Giacometti later distanced himself from the character of his surrealist works, but as viewers we cannot so easily dispel the memory of the brutality that is conveyed here in a work that seems to test the very boundaries of what is acceptable in art.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.