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Lot Essay
In the summer of 1941, Louise Bourgeois moved to a new apartment with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater and their two small boys. It was there that she would create the Personages, a series of slender, anthropomorphic sculptures that were originally carved from salvaged pieces of wood, and later cast in bronze. Arranged singly or in groups, each of the abstracted, totem-like figures projected a powerful physical presence, despite the apparent simplicity of their design. Breaking with tradition, they eschewed the use of a base or pedestal, and instead were meant to be screwed directly into the gallery floor. Bourgeois considered the Personages to be surrogates for real people in her life, hoping to “summon all of the people I missed.” In this, one of the first examples of installation art, Bourgeois was ahead of her time, having created a radical new visual language that served as the springboard for all of her subsequent work.
The Personages are among the most significant contributions to the history of twentieth-century sculpture, with examples found in prestigious museum collections. Bourgeois’s shrewd blend of influences ranged from African fertility sculpture to Dada’s embrace of the readymade and the Surrealist’s exploration of latent desires and dreams. These, coupled with the personal memories of her own childhood, imbued the Personages with universal feelings of desire, longing, fear, love and loss. Bourgeois was only twenty six when she came to America, and in the Personages, she yearns for the family she left behind, but ultimately transforms her feelings into the powerful creative impulse that would sustain her for the next six decades.
Untitled is a silent sentinel who presides over its environment with a compelling physical presence. Originally carved from a single plank of scavenged wood, Untitled was later cast in bronze and painted in two colors, pale blue and white. This vertical, paddle-like form stands watch over the gallery space, with two long slits for its eyes, which Bourgeois made by cutting into the wood with a razor blade. With its height of just over four feet, the Untitled might have been roughly the same height as her eldest son Michael, who would have been around ten years old at the time of the work’s conception. At least one other sculpture was named after her son, Portrait of Jean-Louis (1947-49; Philadelphia Museum of Art), which she created concurrently with the present work.
Having trained as a painter, it was in the early 1940s that Bourgeois first tried her hand at sculpture, abandoning painting for what she described as “deeper things in three dimensions” (L. Bourgeois, quoted in D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 18). She embarked upon the Personages shortly after she moved into her Lower Manhattan building, where she used scavenged planks of wood she found nearby. The majority of her work took place in a small room that was set just off the entryway that provided some seclusion from the usual activity of family life. As a mother of three young children, Bourgeois would often work for uninterrupted stretches in the morning hours when the children were at school, or in the evening after they went to bed. The apartment building allowed roof access, and she would often take the Personages up to the roof – which she called her “sky space” – to reconsider them in new environments.
Although she is typically thought to have worked in relative obscurity during the 1940s and 50s, Bourgeois in fact had many champions. Among them were Marcel Duchamp and the French art dealer Pierre Matisse. Both attended her 1950 exhibit at Peridot Gallery and described it as “extraordinary.” They later convinced Alfred H. Barr to purchase one of her Personages for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The poet Arthur Drexler, another friend and supporter, who later went on to become the Director of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, was the one who arranged for Bourgeois’ first exhibit at Peridot Gallery in 1949. In his recollections of seeing the artist’s work for the first time, he seems to have been utterly enchanted, writing: “I stepped into her studio, and it was like finding yourself in a strange French movie… There stood this very small, intense woman - extremely svelte, handsome - wielding a huge cleaver with which she worked on balsa wood. [...] She was alarming as she attacked the wood with a kind of innocent magic that was obsessive, yet also poetic…I remember thinking that when I entered her studio it was like passing through a mirror into another world" (A. Drexler, quoted in R. Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, New York, 2016, p. 129).
In 2002, Bourgeois simply stated, "Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor" (L. Bourgeois, quoted in J. Acocella, "The Spider's Web: Louise Bourgeois and Her Art," The New Yorker, February 4, 2002, online). Bourgeois always kept her past with her, and ultimately it became a powerful source of inspiration, allowing her to generate some of the most challenging, thought-provoking and revelatory sculpture of the twentieth century.
The Personages are among the most significant contributions to the history of twentieth-century sculpture, with examples found in prestigious museum collections. Bourgeois’s shrewd blend of influences ranged from African fertility sculpture to Dada’s embrace of the readymade and the Surrealist’s exploration of latent desires and dreams. These, coupled with the personal memories of her own childhood, imbued the Personages with universal feelings of desire, longing, fear, love and loss. Bourgeois was only twenty six when she came to America, and in the Personages, she yearns for the family she left behind, but ultimately transforms her feelings into the powerful creative impulse that would sustain her for the next six decades.
Untitled is a silent sentinel who presides over its environment with a compelling physical presence. Originally carved from a single plank of scavenged wood, Untitled was later cast in bronze and painted in two colors, pale blue and white. This vertical, paddle-like form stands watch over the gallery space, with two long slits for its eyes, which Bourgeois made by cutting into the wood with a razor blade. With its height of just over four feet, the Untitled might have been roughly the same height as her eldest son Michael, who would have been around ten years old at the time of the work’s conception. At least one other sculpture was named after her son, Portrait of Jean-Louis (1947-49; Philadelphia Museum of Art), which she created concurrently with the present work.
Having trained as a painter, it was in the early 1940s that Bourgeois first tried her hand at sculpture, abandoning painting for what she described as “deeper things in three dimensions” (L. Bourgeois, quoted in D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 18). She embarked upon the Personages shortly after she moved into her Lower Manhattan building, where she used scavenged planks of wood she found nearby. The majority of her work took place in a small room that was set just off the entryway that provided some seclusion from the usual activity of family life. As a mother of three young children, Bourgeois would often work for uninterrupted stretches in the morning hours when the children were at school, or in the evening after they went to bed. The apartment building allowed roof access, and she would often take the Personages up to the roof – which she called her “sky space” – to reconsider them in new environments.
Although she is typically thought to have worked in relative obscurity during the 1940s and 50s, Bourgeois in fact had many champions. Among them were Marcel Duchamp and the French art dealer Pierre Matisse. Both attended her 1950 exhibit at Peridot Gallery and described it as “extraordinary.” They later convinced Alfred H. Barr to purchase one of her Personages for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The poet Arthur Drexler, another friend and supporter, who later went on to become the Director of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, was the one who arranged for Bourgeois’ first exhibit at Peridot Gallery in 1949. In his recollections of seeing the artist’s work for the first time, he seems to have been utterly enchanted, writing: “I stepped into her studio, and it was like finding yourself in a strange French movie… There stood this very small, intense woman - extremely svelte, handsome - wielding a huge cleaver with which she worked on balsa wood. [...] She was alarming as she attacked the wood with a kind of innocent magic that was obsessive, yet also poetic…I remember thinking that when I entered her studio it was like passing through a mirror into another world" (A. Drexler, quoted in R. Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, New York, 2016, p. 129).
In 2002, Bourgeois simply stated, "Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor" (L. Bourgeois, quoted in J. Acocella, "The Spider's Web: Louise Bourgeois and Her Art," The New Yorker, February 4, 2002, online). Bourgeois always kept her past with her, and ultimately it became a powerful source of inspiration, allowing her to generate some of the most challenging, thought-provoking and revelatory sculpture of the twentieth century.