Louise Bourgeois

Cheim and Read, New York (acquired directly from the artist)

Dinaburg Arts, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2001

Oxford, The Museum of Modern Art, Louise Bourgeois, 1995

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is cooler in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Flawlessly polished black marble protrusions emerge from a roughly hewn and chiselled bed. With sheer edges and a precipice formation, it is as though an ancient, immaculately fossilised nest has been excavated from the ground as an artefact of natural history. Indeed, belonging to a series of works centred on the idea of the ‘nest’, Untitled from 1990 is idiosyncratic of Louise Bourgeois’ seminal sculptural corpus of anthropomorphic landscapes. The clustered ovoids and artillery-shell forms in the present work find their origin in Bourgeois’ 1960s production. Seminal pieces such as Avenza (1968), Noir Veine (1968), Cumul (1969), and her first installation piece,The Destruction of the Father (1974), set the pattern for a form of expression that would take root and recur incessantly throughout the artist’s career.

Following the architectonic corpus of totemic sculptures that dominated her formative practice during the 1940s and 50s, the 1960s yielded a change of direction; turning away from the vertiginous Personages carved from wood, Bourgeois began experimenting with more pliable and traditionally sculptural materials crafted into biomorphic forms. Latex, plastic and marble engendered sensual contrasts in texture that furnished a new and highly organic sculptural expression. From here on in, bulbous protrusions, swollen appendages and eroticised clusters define the fundamental vernacular of Bourgeois’ mature practice. Dually reminiscent of phallic stumps and tumescent breasts or udders these pieces occupy an ambiguous anthropomorphic position through which the sexual-politics of space is tirelessly played out and overturned.

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” (Louise Bourgeois quoted in: Robert Storr, et al., Louise Bourgeois, London 2003, p. 120). Swelling masculinity and swollen femininity combined, Bourgeois’ hybridisation of gendered tropes plays to her ambivalent identification with motherhood and lasting discord with the father figure. By incessantly interrogating and working through the spaces of her anxiety, Bourgeois’ work forms a psychological reflex of confrontation and expulsion.

Entrenched in the mythology surrounding her parentage and upbringing, Bourgeois retrospectively replays, reprises and replicates her unabated memory of the psychological distress that devastated her youth. Born into an affluent home on the provincial outskirts of Paris, she was daughter to Josephine and Louis Bourgeois, proprietors of the restoration and tapestry repair business that first fostered the young artist’s nascent creativity. Nonetheless, family life was fractured and unsettled. Her father was authoritarian, philandering, belittling and often cruel, while his infidelity with the family’s live-in English tutor Sadie, of which her mother was fully aware, incited an enduring sense of betrayal and abandonment that is relentlessly relived through Bourgeois’ work.

These organic, eroticised forms are significantly evocative of Bourgeois’ seminal installation, The Destruction of the Father from 1974. ‘Inspired’ by a dream, this seminal piece forms a response to Bourgeois patricidal urges: “what frightened me was that at the dinner table, my father would go on and on, showing off, aggrandising himself. And the more he showed off, the smaller we felt. Suddenly there was a terrific tension, and we grabbed him... and pulled him onto the table and pulled him apart… we were so successful in beating him up that we ate him up” (Louise Bourgeois quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Louise Bourgeois, 2009, p. 102). Embodying a surreal dramatisation of a family dinner, these amorphous and claustrophobic forms lay bare a destructive oedipal impulse. As though the viewer has stumbled upon the decaying remains of some violent scene, the richly ambiguous tableaux of latex objects strewn across a table is undeniably disquieting.

Marking a return of the repressed, these works invoke materials, spaces and forms inextricably bound to the primal experiences of Bourgeois’ childhood and her subsequent ambiguity towards paternity, maternity, love and power. As masterfully communicated in the present work, Louise Bourgeois’ utterly singular exploration of a primal, obsessive and inchoate psychological world cannot be underestimated for its contribution to feminist psychoanalytic theory and a younger generation of artists that have followed in her wake.