- 50
Louise Bourgeois
Description
- Louise Bourgeois
- Sleeping Figure
- Bronze
- 74 1/2 x 7 7/8 x 6 1/2 in. 189.2 x 20 x 15.5 cm.
- With Base: 75 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 12 1/4 192.4 x 50.8 x 31.1 cm
- This work was cast in 1959 and is from an edition of 6 with only two casts made to date. The bronze version is based on a wood sculpture Sleeping Figure from 1950.
Provenance
Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1981
Exhibited
New York, Peridot Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, October 1950 (wood version)
New York, Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, Sculpture 1941-1953. Plus One New Piece, September - October 1979 (bronze version, the present work)
Literature
Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective, 1982-1983, 1982, p. 57 (wood version) and p. 60 (bronze version, edition number unknown), illustrated
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945-1986, 1986, not illustrated (wood version)
Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Frankfurter Kunstverein (and traveling), Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1989, p. 64 (bronze version, )
Exh. Cat., St. Louis, The St. Louis Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: The Personages, 1994, p. 59, illustrated (wood version)
Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Louise Bourgeois and the Nature of Abstraction, illustrated (wood version)
Mignon Nixon, ``Fantastic Reality: a Note on Louise Bourgeois' Portrait of C.Y''., The Sculpture Journal, Volume V, London, 2001, p. 84, illustrated (wood version)
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Catalogue of the Collection, 2003, p. 203, illustrated (bronze version)
Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois, London, 2003, p. 45, illustrated (wood version)
Catalogue Note
October 1949 marked Louise Bourgeois' sculptural debut with a solo show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. Bourgeois had felt inhibited by the limitations of two-dimensional painting and turned to sculpture to articulate her motivations. Sleeping Figure, the wooden version, was included in her second solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in 1950, and was her first work acquired for the Museum of Modern Art in New York by the director, Alfred Barr. It is from the artist’s important series of Personages that represent the human form reduced to elemental terms yet imbued with great variety in mood and gesture. In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art gave Bourgeois permission to cast the work in bronze. As with many of her pieces, this work was intended to be cast in an edition of six with one artist’s proof. There have only been two bronze cast to date; the present work and another which joined the wood version in the Museum of Modern Art collection.