Woman Swimming

At the height of a dazzling career, Martini entered a dismaying crisis that made him despair even of the real expressive possibilities of sculpture. But in the gloom of anguished doubt and disgust, the sculptor recovered the capacity for rupture and renewal that had already been his in his youth. The circle of his very free inventions closed with fundamental works of contemporary figurative art, such as this admirable swimmer, in which the monumental structure conditions and sustains the absolute rigour of the invention.