Woman with a Broken Shoulder
- Artist: Alberto Giacometti
- Date: c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
- Medium: Bronze
- Dimensions: object: 651 x 121 x 200 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the “Woman with a Broken Shoulder” by Alberto Giacometti. It’s a bronze cast from the late 1950s, released by the artist in 1964 and acquired in 1965. The piece measures roughly 65 × 12 × 20 cm, giving it a tall, almost skeletal silhouette.
Giacometti was fascinated by fragmentary forms – figures with missing arms or limbs – and this work is a perfect example. Its slender shape feels both vivid and fragile, a visual echo of the writer Jean Genet’s remark that Giacometti’s figures reveal the “loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.”
The sculpture stands in a simple, deep base, its bronze patina catching light in a way that highlights the emptiness in the broken shoulder, making the viewer feel the quiet tension between presence and absence.
See it in person
Woman with a Broken Shoulder is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
