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拍品专文
A slender, totemic form rising organically from the ground, Pillar is an elegant example of Louise Bourgeois’s Personages. The artist considered this group of human-sized works—which were first conceived in the 1940s, and many of which today reside in major museums—her first mature sculptural achievement. In them, she explored the themes of family, solitude, creativity and loss that would remain central to her practice for the next six decades. They were carved in wood, and sometimes painted; the present work is a later cast in white-painted bronze. A vertical aperture lined in pale blue pierces its midriff like the eye of a needle. A mirror and a suspended cube of polished bronze gleam within a blue niche at its head. Evoking both the ancient, primal symbolism of fertility idols and the attenuations of modernist sculpture, Pillar exemplifies the combined formal grace and psychic potency that define Bourgeois’s practice. Another from the edition was recently exhibited in her 2024-2025 retrospective at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
In 1938, newly married to the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois had moved from Paris to New York. They adopted a son in 1940; Bourgeois gave birth to a boy herself some months later, and another in 1941. The growing family moved into an apartment block on East 18th Street in August that year. She took the building’s roof as an open-air studio, and it was here that her sculptural work began. The vertical environment informed the Personages, whose helixes, vertebral stacks and skyscraper-like columns are as architectural as they are anthropomorphic. In this sense they developed a theme set out in her early painting series Femme Maison (1945-1947)—denoting both ‘woman house’ and ‘housewife’—which conflated female bodies and buildings. Beyond reflecting on her present situation, the Personages also represented the relationships Bourgeois had left behind in France. ‘A friend asked me what I was doing’, she said. ‘I told him, “I feel so lonely that I am rebuilding these people around me”’ (L. Bourgeois, quoted in M. Brenson, ‘A Sculptor Comes into Her Own’, The New York Times, 31 October 1982, p. 29).
Bourgeois’s art is indivisible from her life story. She suffered a deep-seated trauma stemming from her father’s affair with her English governess, as well as the illness and untimely death of her mother in 1932. In reference to the family business—a tapestry restoration workshop in Aubusson, France, where she assisted with repairs from an early age—she frequently employed metaphors of sewing and mending. Some of her most iconic sculptures figure her mother as a vast, benevolent spider, and many others are constructed from woven textiles. For Bourgeois, the needle was a tool of strength and support, able to restore the fabric of the past, to run a stitch through time, or to knit the pieces of a life together. Pillar echoes the forms of building, body and needle at once: it might be seen to stand as a maternal presence, and perhaps also a self-portrait.
Bourgeois unveiled her Personages in three exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, 1950 and 1953. The sculptures were arranged alone, in pairs, and in small, conversational clusters. Standing as surrogate friends and family members, they activated the gallery as a social space as visitors wandered among them. ‘Their hooded, ghostlike quality,’ writes Lucy Lippard, ‘reminiscent of primitive ancestor totems, was indeed part of a private ritual by which Bourgeois could “summon all of the people I missed. I was not interested in details; I was interested in their physical presence. It was some kind of an encounter”’ (L. Lippard, ‘Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out’, Artforum, March 1975, p. 28). In Paris, Bourgeois had studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and the studio of Fernand Léger. She had made prints while at the Art Students’ League in New York. Following the Personages, it was sculpture, with its strength of physical ‘encounter’, and its ability to conjure what she called ‘fantastic reality’, that would become her definitive medium.
The Personages’ fine obelisks take part in a knowing dialogue with Bourgeois’s artistic contemporaries. With their insistent narrative qualities, they trouble the abstract purity of artists like Brâncuși—whom she knew personally—and complicate Surrealism’s interest in the ‘primitive’, which often brutalised or essentialised the female body. Indeed, with allusive details such as the eye in Pillar, Bourgeois subverted phallic silhouettes with feminine attributes. That she returned to her wooden Personages to cast them in permanent, enduring bronze—a process she began in the 1950s and continued across the decades—testifies to their foundational importance in her work. Pillar, its solitary form both delicate and steadfast, encapsulates the artist’s deeply personal themes in a universal image. Like a stem reaching upwards from the ground, it is rooted in its past but points to the future. Bourgeois erects a monument to memory, to motherhood and to the healing power of her art.
In 1938, newly married to the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois had moved from Paris to New York. They adopted a son in 1940; Bourgeois gave birth to a boy herself some months later, and another in 1941. The growing family moved into an apartment block on East 18th Street in August that year. She took the building’s roof as an open-air studio, and it was here that her sculptural work began. The vertical environment informed the Personages, whose helixes, vertebral stacks and skyscraper-like columns are as architectural as they are anthropomorphic. In this sense they developed a theme set out in her early painting series Femme Maison (1945-1947)—denoting both ‘woman house’ and ‘housewife’—which conflated female bodies and buildings. Beyond reflecting on her present situation, the Personages also represented the relationships Bourgeois had left behind in France. ‘A friend asked me what I was doing’, she said. ‘I told him, “I feel so lonely that I am rebuilding these people around me”’ (L. Bourgeois, quoted in M. Brenson, ‘A Sculptor Comes into Her Own’, The New York Times, 31 October 1982, p. 29).
Bourgeois’s art is indivisible from her life story. She suffered a deep-seated trauma stemming from her father’s affair with her English governess, as well as the illness and untimely death of her mother in 1932. In reference to the family business—a tapestry restoration workshop in Aubusson, France, where she assisted with repairs from an early age—she frequently employed metaphors of sewing and mending. Some of her most iconic sculptures figure her mother as a vast, benevolent spider, and many others are constructed from woven textiles. For Bourgeois, the needle was a tool of strength and support, able to restore the fabric of the past, to run a stitch through time, or to knit the pieces of a life together. Pillar echoes the forms of building, body and needle at once: it might be seen to stand as a maternal presence, and perhaps also a self-portrait.
Bourgeois unveiled her Personages in three exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, 1950 and 1953. The sculptures were arranged alone, in pairs, and in small, conversational clusters. Standing as surrogate friends and family members, they activated the gallery as a social space as visitors wandered among them. ‘Their hooded, ghostlike quality,’ writes Lucy Lippard, ‘reminiscent of primitive ancestor totems, was indeed part of a private ritual by which Bourgeois could “summon all of the people I missed. I was not interested in details; I was interested in their physical presence. It was some kind of an encounter”’ (L. Lippard, ‘Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out’, Artforum, March 1975, p. 28). In Paris, Bourgeois had studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and the studio of Fernand Léger. She had made prints while at the Art Students’ League in New York. Following the Personages, it was sculpture, with its strength of physical ‘encounter’, and its ability to conjure what she called ‘fantastic reality’, that would become her definitive medium.
The Personages’ fine obelisks take part in a knowing dialogue with Bourgeois’s artistic contemporaries. With their insistent narrative qualities, they trouble the abstract purity of artists like Brâncuși—whom she knew personally—and complicate Surrealism’s interest in the ‘primitive’, which often brutalised or essentialised the female body. Indeed, with allusive details such as the eye in Pillar, Bourgeois subverted phallic silhouettes with feminine attributes. That she returned to her wooden Personages to cast them in permanent, enduring bronze—a process she began in the 1950s and continued across the decades—testifies to their foundational importance in her work. Pillar, its solitary form both delicate and steadfast, encapsulates the artist’s deeply personal themes in a universal image. Like a stem reaching upwards from the ground, it is rooted in its past but points to the future. Bourgeois erects a monument to memory, to motherhood and to the healing power of her art.