The initiative for creating this series came about in 1956, when Gordon Bunshaft, the architect for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York City’s financial district, asked Giacometti to design a group of sculptures for the building’s large plaza on Pine Street. Initially Bunchaft had envisioned for the plaza an enlarged version of Giacometti’s Three Walking Men of 1949, heightening the original sculpture to nearly sixty feet to suit the scale of the sixty-story building. Instead, Giacometti proposed an entirely new composition that would be tailored to the proportions of the space in question. This proposed sculptural ensemble would consist of a head on a pedestal, a walking man and a standing woman—three themes which dominated the artist’s oeuvre. Working from a cardboard scale model of Chase Manhattan Plaza, Giacometti created variant small models of these figures in his studio in Paris. In 1960, he finally cast a head, two variations of the walking man and four different tall standing women.

Giacometti never submitted his final versions of these sculptures to the selection committee in New York, and his intentions for displaying these works in the plaza were never fully clarified. Having never visited New York City at the time of their conception, his reservations rested mostly with his mixed feelings about the size of the Femmes, which he felt were too tall in their context with the building. But, when he finally visited New York in 1965 and saw Chase Manhattan Plaza for the first time, his feelings about the size of his sculptures suddenly changed, and he even proposed making his Grandes femmes twenty-five feet tall. Although his brother Diego created an armature for this project, Giacometti died before he could ever complete the work, and the Grandes femmes of 1960 remained the largest sculptures of Giacometti’s oeuvre and the embodiment of his newfound appreciation of sculptural monumentality.

The present cast of Grande femme I, cast during the artist’s lifetime in 1960, comes from an edition of nine bronzes cast between 1960 and 1981. Other casts from the edition reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence; and the Fondation Giacometti, Paris.