Louise Bourgeois

Cheim & Read, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Stable Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Recent Sculpture, January 1964 (plaster version exhibited)
New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Bourgeois Trust, November - December 1982, n.p., illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
New York, Museum of Modern Art; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Akron Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective, November 1982 - January 1984, pl. 85 & 86, p. 71, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Bridgehampton, Dia Art Foundation, Louise Bourgeois: Works from the Sixties, May - June 1989, p. 12, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Frankfurt, Kunstverein; Munich, Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; Lyon, Musée d’art Contemporain; Barcelona, Fundación Tàpies; Bern, Kunstmuseum; Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum, Louise Bourgeois Retrospective Exhibition, December 1989 - July 1990, pl. 34, p. 89, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Vienna, Galerie Krinzinger, Louise Bourgeois: 1938-1989, May - June 1990 (plaster version exhibited)
Monterrey, MARCO; Seville, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo; Mexico City, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Louise Bourgeois, June 1995 - August 1996, fig. 29, p. 62, illustrated (bronze; ed. 2/6 exhibited)
Yokohama Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois: Homesickness, November - January 1998, pl. 34, p. 68, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Louise Bourgeois: Architecture and Memory, November 1999 - February 2000, pl. 25, n.p., illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Kyunggi-Do, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Louise Bourgeois: The Space of Memory, September 2000 - November 2000, pl. 26, p. 125, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Oakland, Mills College Art Museum; Boise Museum of Art; Richmond, Marsh Art Gallery; Durham, University of New Hampshire; El Paso Museum of Art; Lexington, University of Kentucky Museum of Art; New Orleans, Newcomb Gallery; Metropolitan State College of Denver Center for the Visual Arts, True Grit: Seven Female Visionaries Before Feminism, September - April 2004 (bronze; ed. AP exhibited)
Beacon, Dia Center for the Arts, Louise Bourgeois Installation at Inauguration of Dia:Beacon, May 2003 - present, n.p. (text) (bronze; ed. AP exhibited)
London, Tate Modern; Paris, Centre Pompidou; New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Louise Bourgeois Retrospective, October 2007 - June 2009, fig. 290, p. 288, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)
Art Gallery of Ontario, Transformation AGO: Contemporary Art, 1960 - 1970, November 2008 - December 2009 (bronze; ed. 2/6 exhibited)
London, Hauser & Wirth, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, November - December 2009 (bronze; ed. 2/6 exhibited)
Athens, Museum of Cycladic Art, Louise Bourgeois, May - September 2010 (bronze; ed. 2/6 exhibited)
Berlin, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg; The Hague, Gemeentemuseum; Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Bellmer/Bourgeois – Double Sexus, April 2010 - July 2011, p. 79, illustrated (bronze, ed. 6/6 exhibited)
Buenos Aires, Fundación PROA (exhibition titled Louise Bourgeois: Return of the Repressed); São Paulo, Instituto Tomie Ohtake; Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Moderna, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Forbidden Desire, March - November 2011, Vol. 1, pl. 13, p. 171, illustrated (plaster version exhibited)

Robert Storr with Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois, London 2003, p. 61 (bronze; another example illustrated)
Ann Coxon, Louise Bourgeois, London 2010, p. 43 (plaster version illustrated)
Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells, Berlin 2011, fig. 87, p. 58 (plaster version illustrated)
Robert Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, New York 2016, p. 309 (plaster version illustrated)

This work is in excellent condition overall. Under raking light there are some faint, unobtrusive scattered surface scratches. Under very close inspection, there is evidence of minor pinpoint areas of oxidation to the patina on the reverse.
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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After an eleven year period of withdrawal from the art world and during her most intense period of psychoanalysis, Bourgeois resurfaces in the mid-1960s revealing a new body of work consisting of softer sculptures composed of malleable materials such as latex and plaster, from which the present work was cast in bronze. Her return was marked by a 1964 solo exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Recent Sculpture presenting an innovative body of abstract sculpture at the Stable Gallery in New York. This exhibition would be the artist’s only solo exhibition in over twenty years, from 1953-1974. The plaster version of the present work, the first to be completed from the group of works exhibited, undoubtedly served as a catalyst for the artist’s departure from her earlier rigid structures culminating in a series of seminal works indelibly imbued with a deeper interpretation of her conflicting emotions surrounding her childhood and unearthed from her own psychoanalysis.

The embrace, a motif closely tied to Louise Bourgeois’ themes of trauma and hidden emotion, is the central focus of Clutching, comprised of organic strands recalling the materials, spaces and forms inextricably bound to her nascent childhood experiences and a period of psychoanalysis between the years of 1951 and 1967. The tensions that result from her practice of exorcising the past into the present serve to form the fundamental conflicts and dynamics central to Bourgeois’ oeuvre.

Entrenched in the mythology surrounding her upbringing, Bourgeois retrospectively replays, reprises and replicates inner distress at a level of artistic production compelled by her own psychoanalysis. Standing at the forefront of this dialogue, the present work alludes to Bourgeois’ childhood desire for an escape from the distress in her home in the cathartic form of an embrace. The profound and complex psychological effect of her upbringing with its underlying cross-currents of betrayal and fidelity has become the accepted “myth” around which Bourgeois’ artistic identity has been constructed.

The metaphors and symbolic figurations that populate her oeuvre navigate the thin divide between the dualities of nurture and isolation and love and abandonment. Bourgeois has famously expressed maternal ambivalence owing to her own need to be nurtured: “One needs a mother. I understand that, but I refuse to be your mother because I need a mother myself.” (Louise Bourgeois cited in Mignon Nixon, Reconstructing the Past: Louise Bourgeois and Psychoanalysis, 2007, London, Tate Publishing, p. 214) The loss of her own mother in 1932 was a trauma the artist never truly surmounted and imparted a denial of separation that is apposite for an understanding of the present work, whose title further ratifies this denial of separation from her mother and her innate desire to hold onto her embrace.

Clutching unmistakably alludes to Bourgeois’ need for protection and her simultaneous rejection of it hinting at the very contradictory emotions and impulses of this most complex artist, all originating from the basic trauma of her early life later articulated through her work to construct a mythic legend that permeated her aesthetic psyche. The present work’s ability to evoke such a personal and powerful emotional response though cast in unforgiving bronze further emphasizes its duality of trauma and comfort. In further interpreting Bourgeois’ oeuvre, Jerry Gorovoy comments: “Through shape and line, material and texture, Bourgeois is able to give a palpable specificity to her memories. More than just marking time, and nostalgic reminiscing, Bourgeois wants through her sculpture to re-create the past, to have total recall to the emotions, to analyze the event, to control it, to correct it, and finally to forgive and forget it. …Bourgeois’ sculptures mark a collection of traumas, fears, anxieties, resentments, and unfulfilled desires which through her sculptures she is able to exorcise.’’ (Exh. Cat., Yokohama Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois: Homesickness, 1997, n.p.)

The encapsulating intimacy of this seminal work conveys a confronting yet comforting presence. The intertwined finger-like spirals are grasping at something which is inevitably slipping away, symbolizing Bourgeois’ conflicting emotions associated with her past, the loss of her mother and her constant struggle with letting go.  Clutching is a vivid representation of the artist grappling with the dualities of her upbringing - abandonment and protection - the cause and effect that has come to define her childhood and through her artistic production is exorcised into her work. Clutching bespeaks the physical and emotional calmness tied to the catharsis of an embrace, vulnerable and yet protected, this sculpture radiates a sense of tranquility amidst trauma.