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Lot Essay
When Louise Bourgeois had her sculpture debut in an exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York, the space was filled with strange, elongated figures who were spread out, alone or in groups, throughout. Amongst these stood the simplified effigy of a woman carrying packages, the same as the one standing at the heart of Quarantania, a bronze reprisal of this momentous episode. Some of the other figures here present can also be recognised in contemporary photographs both of the exhibition, and of the artist and her studio. In Quarantania, this group has been arranged in such a way as to present the viewer with an enigmatic sense of family, of a woman surrounded by guardians or wards. Are these the protectors or the protected? As in the original Peridot configurations-- which caused a great stir at the time and were a marked innovation in the presentation of works of art as installation-- rather than discrete objects, Quarantania presents us with a powerful dynamic that relies on the unspoken, unresolved and therefore all the more intriguing mysteries of the relationships between the various individual characters. They are, as Bourgeois pointed out, "Attached. They are dependent on each other for better or worse" (L. Bourgeois quoted in B.F. Colin, "A Conversation with Louise Bourgeois," reproduced at www.frigatezine.com, 2000).
It is not the existence of the figures alone, but rather the relationship between them, between them and the viewer, and between them and the sculptor, that is crucial. These lifesize effigies are, despite the almost Arp-like simplicity of the forms that have been used to conjure them, personalities, and as such are deeply personal facets of Bourgeois' own life and relationships. Crucially, they reflect her relationship with her family, which remained in her native France while she was in the United States, having married the art historian Robert Goldwater.
The figures are all tower-like, all parallel, reflecting the artist's interest in the soaring, gleaming skyscrapers of New York, in Euclid, in geometry, and in lines that rise upwards yet will never meet. Thus the cool scientific rigour of architecture and of the mathematics which she had studied at the Sorbonne is used here in an artistic content in order to convey an emotional state, to capture the futility of the relationships between these figures, to translate an existential and deeply personal emotional anxiety at the limitations and even impossibilities of communication.
Because these slender elements are life-sized, because they inhabit our space much as a human would, their physical presence emphasizes this emotional conjuring of those distant friends, separated from the artist by geography and sometimes by death. And yet their thinness, which makes them appear as shard-like, as fragmentary mirages, as somehow insubstantial, shows the impossibility of this reconciliation, an impossibility that would only increase in 1951 with the death of the artist's father.
The astuteness with which Bourgeois manages to tap into the deeper, less specific anxieties and emotions of the viewer while also exploring her own specific thoughts and feelings is made especially evident in Quarantania in its sense of precarious balance. This is most clear in the strange, almost organic and highly evocative 'packages' that the woman holds; it is also clear in the shapes of the figures themselves. These slender objects appear to teeter on the brink of collapse, supported by an unknown force, their bases thin in circumference, giving an impression of fragility that extends to the emotional. The status quo, it appears, is being upheld only through a superhuman effort. Bourgeois herself explained this phenomenon, saying her sculptures from this period,
"... get thinner toward the base. They are delicate on their feet. They are not monuments. It is a more fragile balance. Physical and psychological presence is a balance. That is the tension of being human, the fragility of people. We are always afraid of falling so we balance ourselves" (L. Bourgeois quoted in M. Auping, "Interview with Michael Auping," Bernadac & Obrist, eds., opus cit, 2000, pp. 353-54).
This fear of falling resonates through every level of Quarantania, from the seemingly impossible equilibrium of the figures to the title itself. For while the clear linguistic link to the number 40 in the title appears to link Quarantania perhaps to Bourgeois's own concerns about her age-- she turned 40 in 1951-- it is also the name of the mountain traditionally linked to the biblical temptation of Christ, taking its name from the forty days and nights of fasting that this episode involved.
The present work is a painted bronze that was cast from the wooden original, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As can be seen by the list of exhibitions and literature in which the sculpture has been included, the subject is one of the most widely seen works in her entire oeuvre. In the wooden version, Bourgeois had taken several separate works from the late 1940s and, in 1953, arranged them in a group that itself condensed some of the mystery and potency of the relationships evident in the original Peridot exhibitions. In 1983, in the wake of the MoMA retrospective a year earlier, she cast a small group of bronze versions of Quarantania in a foundry in New Jersey. While most of them precisely mimicked the composition of the MoMA original, Bourgeois intervened during the execution of the present work, slightly altering the positions of the characters, making this a unique example, a sculpture with profound links to two very different eras in the artist's career.
It is not the existence of the figures alone, but rather the relationship between them, between them and the viewer, and between them and the sculptor, that is crucial. These lifesize effigies are, despite the almost Arp-like simplicity of the forms that have been used to conjure them, personalities, and as such are deeply personal facets of Bourgeois' own life and relationships. Crucially, they reflect her relationship with her family, which remained in her native France while she was in the United States, having married the art historian Robert Goldwater.
The figures are all tower-like, all parallel, reflecting the artist's interest in the soaring, gleaming skyscrapers of New York, in Euclid, in geometry, and in lines that rise upwards yet will never meet. Thus the cool scientific rigour of architecture and of the mathematics which she had studied at the Sorbonne is used here in an artistic content in order to convey an emotional state, to capture the futility of the relationships between these figures, to translate an existential and deeply personal emotional anxiety at the limitations and even impossibilities of communication.
Because these slender elements are life-sized, because they inhabit our space much as a human would, their physical presence emphasizes this emotional conjuring of those distant friends, separated from the artist by geography and sometimes by death. And yet their thinness, which makes them appear as shard-like, as fragmentary mirages, as somehow insubstantial, shows the impossibility of this reconciliation, an impossibility that would only increase in 1951 with the death of the artist's father.
The astuteness with which Bourgeois manages to tap into the deeper, less specific anxieties and emotions of the viewer while also exploring her own specific thoughts and feelings is made especially evident in Quarantania in its sense of precarious balance. This is most clear in the strange, almost organic and highly evocative 'packages' that the woman holds; it is also clear in the shapes of the figures themselves. These slender objects appear to teeter on the brink of collapse, supported by an unknown force, their bases thin in circumference, giving an impression of fragility that extends to the emotional. The status quo, it appears, is being upheld only through a superhuman effort. Bourgeois herself explained this phenomenon, saying her sculptures from this period,
"... get thinner toward the base. They are delicate on their feet. They are not monuments. It is a more fragile balance. Physical and psychological presence is a balance. That is the tension of being human, the fragility of people. We are always afraid of falling so we balance ourselves" (L. Bourgeois quoted in M. Auping, "Interview with Michael Auping," Bernadac & Obrist, eds., opus cit, 2000, pp. 353-54).
This fear of falling resonates through every level of Quarantania, from the seemingly impossible equilibrium of the figures to the title itself. For while the clear linguistic link to the number 40 in the title appears to link Quarantania perhaps to Bourgeois's own concerns about her age-- she turned 40 in 1951-- it is also the name of the mountain traditionally linked to the biblical temptation of Christ, taking its name from the forty days and nights of fasting that this episode involved.
The present work is a painted bronze that was cast from the wooden original, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As can be seen by the list of exhibitions and literature in which the sculpture has been included, the subject is one of the most widely seen works in her entire oeuvre. In the wooden version, Bourgeois had taken several separate works from the late 1940s and, in 1953, arranged them in a group that itself condensed some of the mystery and potency of the relationships evident in the original Peridot exhibitions. In 1983, in the wake of the MoMA retrospective a year earlier, she cast a small group of bronze versions of Quarantania in a foundry in New Jersey. While most of them precisely mimicked the composition of the MoMA original, Bourgeois intervened during the execution of the present work, slightly altering the positions of the characters, making this a unique example, a sculpture with profound links to two very different eras in the artist's career.