Louise Bourgeois

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1991

Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Frauenmacht und Mannerherrschaft im Kulturvergleich, November 1997 - March 1998 (edition no. unknown)
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Jaffe-Friede & Strauss Galleries, Louise Bourgeois, February - March 1999, (edition no. unknown) 
Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Artworlds in Dialogue, October 1999 – April 2000, (edition no. unknown)
Williamstown, Willliams College Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois: Sleepwalking, November 2001 – August 2002, (edition no. unknown)
Havana, Wilfredo Lam Center, Louise Bourgeois: One and Others, February - April 2005 (edition no. unknown)
Athens, The Museum of Cycladic Art, Greece Louise Bourgeois, May – September 2010 (edition no. unknown)

Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells, Munich, 1997, p. 64, fig. 100, illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Exh. Cat., Champaign, University of Illinois, Krannert Art Museum; Madison, Madison Art Center; Aspen, Aspen Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work, May 2002 – February 2003, cat. no. 31., p. 86, illustrated in color (another example)

This sculpture is in very good condition. Each vertical element is attached by a rod to a 1/8" stainless steel base plate and each is slightly loose. The warm brown patina exhibits no obtrusive signs of scratches or nicks.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Knife Couple is a quintessential avatar in Louise Bourgeois’ lexicon of totemic figures known as Personages which began her early foray into sculpture in the early 1940s and continuing into the 1950s. The clarity and force of Knife Couple and its companion works demonstrate Bourgeois’ singular focus on the psychological and the symbolic as the dominant imperative for form and content. Indeed, the animistic force and intuitive impact of Bourgeois’ Personages is the key to the central elements that flow through the entire oeuvre of this premier sculptress of the 20^th century. The subsequent bronze versions of the early wood Personages, such as the present work, attest to the artist’s continued commitment to the series and their perpetual relevance to her work. In the artist’s own words, her early totemic figures “are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness. Eighteenth century painters made `conversation pieces’; my sculptures might be called `confrontation pieces'.” (Walker Art Center, Design Quarterly, Minneapolis, 1954, no. 30, p. 18)

October 1949 marked Bourgeois’ public sculptural debut with a solo show at Peridot Gallery in New York titled Louise Bourgeois: Recent Work 1947-1949: Seventeen Standing Figures in Wood. With her second show at Peridot in 1950, she presented fifteen Personages, including Knife Couple, as standing sentinels silently interspersed across the gallery space. The abstracted Personages were reductive, sensuous and totemic, painted in solid colors of mostly black and white to emphasize the unitary nature of their form. In her early Peridot exhibitions, the gallery floor served as the boundaries for the environment of Bourgeois’ forms, allowing the visitor to walk among her sculptures as if in dialogue with them or participating in their story. To further the poetic sense of narrative, Bourgeois also began to join her forms together in specific pairs as in Knife Couple or groups as in the great Fôret (Night Garden) of 1953 and the grand Quarantania (1947-1953), achieving rich associations within a single work. Robert Storr wrote of such cumulative works in the catalogue for the recent traveling retrospective of her work organized by the Tate Gallery. “Surrealist biomorphism thus allowed not only for allusion to, or alternate representations of, the body, but for a fundamental remaking of the world in which simple elements – a pen stroke or arabesque, carved chunk or length of wood, lump of clay or plaster - could be made to change identity or referent according to its `behaviour’ in isolation or in groups. At any given moment, such an element might suggest the geographical or geological, the vegetal or the animal, the male or female. Virtually never do any of them stand unmistakably for one thing.” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, 2008, p. 32)

The complex psychological motivations behind the art of Bourgeois have been the subject of many treatises and theories, all absorbed primarily with the emotional trauma and stress of her childhood which was so dramatically fractured by her father’s infidelity and strained by her mother’s chronic illness and death.  Bourgeois’ deeply felt associations with home, family, isolation, sexuality and identity are a constant in her repertoire and are most provocatively revealed in the sculptural medium, inaugurated by her Personages. Bourgeois ventured into sculpture in search of a greater expressiveness and heightened experience. She relished the concreteness of the three-dimensional which has a greater reality for the artist and viewer alike, and felt that the physical tangibility of sculpture was inseparable from emotional intensity whether the sensibility was one of tranquility or tension. From 1947-1955, Bourgeois was inspired to create an abundant range of moods and motifs in the Personages - from vulnerability to aggression, isolation to integration, figurative to architectural. The pairing of Knife Couple embodies this duality of mood and symbolism in the extreme. The title evokes violence, just as in Dagger Child of 1947-1949, currently in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Rigorously reductive, both sculptures recall tapering blades and their verticality evokes aggression, yet their slender forms, existing in the quietude of open spaces also hint at vulnerability, particularly in the dialogue inherent to Knife Couple. Not touching, yet gently bent toward the other, each totemic form in this sculpture is simultaneously alienated and yearning.

The primitive aspects of the Personages were also a deep reflection of Bourgeois’ marriage and the creative environment in which the sculptures were born. Bourgeois was living in Paris when she met and married Robert Goldwater in 1938, moving to New York City the same year. Goldwater opened a world of contacts and experiences for Bourgeois among the New York art community of scholars, curators, artists and European émigrés. The couple shared an affinity for the profound importance of indigenous and nativist cultures. Goldwater published a pioneering monograph, Primitivism in Modern Painting, in 1938 and was appointed the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in 1957. Bourgeois was one of many modernist artists clearly drawn to African and Oceanic art forms and ritual objects, responding intuitively to the simplicity of form, variety of natural materials and the fundamental immediacy of tribal objects. While the Personages have a wide range of sources, including utilitarian objects and objects of war, Bourgeois’ totemic forms have a strong psychic connection with tribal artifacts and fetishes, combining this influence with the verticality of the modernist skyscrapers that surrounded Bourgeois on her East 18^th Street rooftop where she worked on the earliest Personages. Eventually bringing the sculptures down into her studio and eventually into the Peridot Gallery, Bourgeois combined these basic forms in pairs or groups, and gained great inspiration from installing the individual sculptures in varied arrangements like figures on a stage. In works such as Knife Couple, Bourgeois reveled in the myriad tensions and dialogues between individual components and sculptures, seeing them as shifting parts in an overall whole that mirrored the complexity of human existence.