Louise Bourgeois

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Galerie Lelong, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1994

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture, 1984
Los Angeles, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, 1984
Paris, Maeght-Lelong, Louise Bourgeois: Retrospektive 1947-1984, 1985
New York, Carlo Lamagna Gallery, Traps, 1987
Cincinnati, The Taft Museum; Miami, The Art Museum at International University;  Texas, Laguna Gloria Art Museum; St. Louis, Gallery of Art, Washington University; Syracuse, Everson Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois, 1987-89

Exhibition Catalogue, Paris and Zurich, Galerie Maeght-Lelong, Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective 1947-1984, 1985, p. 25, illustration of another example
Exhibition Catalogue, Cincinnati, Taft Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois, 1987, illustration of another example
Exhibition Catalogue, Frankfurt, Frankfurter Kunstverein; Main, Steinernes Haus am Römerberg, Louise Bourgeois, 1989-1990, p. 32, no. 10, illustration of another example
Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in The Age of Doubt, New York 1999, p. 240, illustration of another example

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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“Oh, the question of male or female? – well, the fact is that the interpretation is the privilege of the viewer."

Louise Bourgeois cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Louise Bourgeois, 2007, p. 161.


Simultaneously self-portrait, biomorphic composite and minimalist totem, Nature Study from 1984 consummately summates Louise Bourgeois’ negotiation of sexual politics via an extraordinarily loaded and often surreal host of visual referents. Elegant and luxuriant in appearance, the delicately swollen bronze pillar and polished gold appendage integrates a serene Brancusian aesthetic with an ambiguous articulation of phallic potency and female fertility. Indeed, though echoing the form of ancient Earth Goddesses or the Roman Artemis of Epheus, Bourgeois’ allusion to maternity and femininity is counteracted by a hermaphroditic disavowal of gendered norms. Totemic architecture is enmeshed with figuration, and sexual identity is undone and recapitulated via its compound parts. Representing a hybrid that fuses predominant characteristics from two of Bourgeois’ most famous bodies of work, The Personages and Janus Fleuri, Nature Study is at once elegiac, phallically potent, and maternally protective.

Executed in 1984, the present work draws directly on Bourgeois’ first significant body of work, The Personages. Initiated during the 1940s shortly following the artist’s emigration to New York in 1938, this corpus of caryatid-like totems comprise the very blue-print of Bourgeois’ future production. As Josef Helfenstein has noted: “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: Ibid., p. 207). Distinctly evocative of tradition and decisive artistic movements yet not held hostage by their canons, Bourgeois’ first authoritative body of work invokes an encyclopaedic host of influences and allusions. Nonetheless, though the Personages traverse and suggest the formal conceits of Cubism and Surrealism, and while deeply evocative of Brancusí’s pre-minimal Bird in Space and Alberto Giacommeti’s severe transmutation of the human form, Bourgeois pursued an entirely singular direction compelled by her own psychical necessities.

For Bourgeois these early years spent in New York not only brought motherhood, but a plague of homesickness and an acute sense of severance from her family in Paris. Emerging from this profound sense of loss, these early works represent monuments to, or surrogates for, the people she left behind. As substitutes for the missing, the Personages inhabit a somewhat comforting yet uncanny human equivalence; life-size and architectonic, their abstract anthropometric forms evoke a solemn and mournful fragility.

Executed some forty-years later, the present Nature Study inhabits a position that at once assumes the essential form of these early mournful expressions of loss – feeling which coincided with Bourgeois’ formative experiences of motherhood - whilst directly confronting the viewer with an explicit and dual allusion to the site of gendered difference and the divergent loci of sexual power/passivity. Standing tall and erect, the totemic pole of Nature of Study is crowned by two symmetrical and tumescent golden lozenges. Simultaneously male and female, Bourgeois institutes a merging of or equilibrium between the genders: “There has always been a sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapes – clusters of breasts like clouds – but often I merge that imagery – phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive” (the artist cited in: Robert Storr, et. al., Louise Bourgeois, London 2003, p. 120). Utterly ambivalent, Nature Study appropriates the shape of Bourgeois’ famous work Janus Fleuri of 1969. Pendulous yet affixed to its slender post, the anthropomorphic form incites the same ambiguous host of references assigned to Bourgeois’ interpretation of the double-faced and dual-gendered Janus, the Greek god of beginnings and transitions: “it is symmetrical, like the human body, and it has the scale of those various parts of the body to which it may, perhaps, refer: a double facial mask, two breasts, two knees… it is perhaps a self-portrait – one of many” (the artist cited in: Ibid., p. 118).

Alert and vigilant like a guardian or warning beacon, Nature Study combines Bourgeois’ own ambivalence and changeable relationship with maternity and motherhood that has emerged as perhaps the overarching theme of her later production. At once embodying psychological loss and an ambiguous gendering that bespeaks the protective agency of the phallic mother, Nature Study represents a searing artistic confessional intertwined within a complex universal scrutiny of sexual-political power dynamics. As masterfully communicated in the present work, Louise Bourgeois’ pioneering agenda and unmatched aesthetic exploration of a primal, obsessive and inchoate psychological world continues to resonate strongly in contemporary art today.