Viscerally provocative and poignantly melancholy, Observer is a serene and elegiac example of Louise Bourgeois’ totemic series of Personages. One of the most anthropomorphic of the series, Observer stands over six feet tall, its body divided into head, torso and limbs; standing on the ground without a plinth, the stately form is directly encountered by the viewer as if a life-like presence. Further distinguished as one of only three works with moveable parts, Observer is a rare and unique example of the series that is widely considered the first great achievement of Bourgeois’ mature artistic practice. Comprising approximately 80 unique wooden iterations created during the late 1940s and early 1950s, these stela-like figures made up the substance of her breakthrough exhibition at the Peridot Gallery, New York, in 1949. Installed together in clusters or in isolation – to echo the social interactions of human beings – these pieces fuse figuration and abstraction, anthropometry and architecture, to evoke a surreal encounter in real space that is irrefutably human.

Observer captures Bourgeois at a traumatic moment of transition. In 1938, the newly wed Bourgeois left France and settled in New York with her husband, the pioneering art historian Robert Goldwater, who held an academic position at NYU. For Bourgeois, the ensuing years, marked by the second World War, brought a plague of homesickness and an acute sense of severance from her family in Paris. Substitutes for the missing, the Personages inhabit a somewhat comforting yet uncanny human equivalence: life-size and architectonic, their abstract anthropomorphic forms evoke a solemn and mournful fragility. Here, a human-scaled figure wearing an identifying hat or lintel imparts an outward physical counterpart to Bourgeois’ inner bereavement; by turning her attachment to loss and mourning into an external project of making, the sculpture serves to reconstruct the past and recall the missing. Grounded in her immediate emotional present, yet standing as universal beacons for loss, the Personages form the very genesis of Bourgeois’ astounding career. From this moment on, Bourgeois would mine and draw upon the traumas of her own unique psychic landscape as a means of cathartic exorcism.

The present work is especially redolent of Bourgeois’ deeply personal artistic vernacular and psychological metaphorizing. Like the designations Bourgeois often gave to works throughout her career that suggest aspects of her own history, it has been suggested that Observer was titled to reference the artist’s memory of a particular work of art: a stone sculpture of the lovers Pomona and Vertumnus in the garden of her family’s estate in Choisy, that she recalled “observing” her and her siblings in childhood. (Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed., Material Meanings: Selections from the Constance R. Caplan Collection, Chicago 2020, p. 48) Indeed, the ancient story of seduction and deception from Ovid’s Metamorphoses prefigures the drama played out by Bourgeois’ father and his mistress, which had such a profound effect on her art. Beyond biography, this totemic entity also references the prevailing Modernism of the previous generation, at once evoking the influence of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, echoing the towering monumentality of Alberto Giacometti’s wraith-like forms, and perpetuating Surrealism’s recourse to the subconscious. Observer also anticipates the eerie, imposing, life-like figures that would become her best-known works, from the multiform hanging sculptures to the monumental Spiders. As Josef Helfenstein has written: “The Personages, the most distinct group of Bourgeois’ early work, have only been recently recognized as an outstanding contribution to the history of sculpture in the twentieth century. Although Bourgeois has developed her works in unprecedented directions after 1955, constantly shifting to new concepts, styles and materials, the Personages provide the key to crucial themes and concerns of her entire body of work.” (Josef Helfenstein, “Personages: Animism versus Modernist Sculpture” in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern [and travelling], Louise Bourgeois, 2007, p. 207) Observer thus masterfully embodies an expression that is at once universal yet achingly personal, and sets the confessional tone for the next fifty years of Bourgeois’ ground-breaking artistic practice.

Artist

Louise Bourgeois