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Lot Essay
Conceived in the late 1940s, Louise Bourgeois’ Breasted Woman belongs to a group of sculptures known as her Personages—evocative works now widely regarded by scholars as among the most outstanding contributions to the history of sculpture in the 20th century. These striking forms are deeply personal works which reflect the complex emotional life of the artist. Executed when the artist was living away from her native France in New York, the totemic figure deals with themes of life, love, loss and the maternal nature of femininity. Widely exhibited and extensively cited in the scholarly literature about the artist, Breasted Woman has become one of Bourgeois most well-known and celebrated forms.
Standing just over four feet tall, this totemic figure is comprised of a vertical arrangement of protruding, semi-biological forms. Emanating from the metal base, this progression begins with two, almost spherical objects, upon which the other forms are placed. Gradually elongating as the eye moves up the work, these elements become more and more biomorphic before, at the mid-point, one of the sections splits into two adjoining parts, thus becoming the most apparent breast-like of the elements of the work’s title. Continuing to the upper portion of the work, the elements become large and flatter—more mask-like even—until they are crowned with a magnificent triangular pediment which is open at its core to reveal a further dimension—that of space.
Executed in bronze (one of the most traditional sculptural mediums), this work possess both physical and metaphorical historical resonance in abundance. The bronze gives the sculpture an elegance and majesty that is common with the great sculptures of history, while the high textured surface of the wooden original remains, imbuing it with a tactility and intimacy that can only come from a hand created work. Conceived in 1949-1950, Bourgeois first executed Breasted Woman in wood, keeping it in her own private collection until 1991 when she cast the subsequent edition of six (plus one artist’s proof) in bronze. The importance of this particular form to the artist can thus be seen not only in the lifelong relationship that she formed with the object, but also her ultimate ambition to preserve it in bronze.
Breasted Woman was conceived during a pivotal decade for the artist. She moved to New York from Paris in 1938 with her new husband, the distinguished art historian Robert Goldwater. During the subsequent decade, her life had undergone great upheaval as not only had she become a mother, but she also suffered from periods of severe homesickness after being separated from her friends and family in France. Here she was, in a new city and surrounded almost exclusively by the predominantly male Abstract Expressionists. Thus her upright forms “reflect not only the forms of the surrounding skyscrapers, and therefore the vocabulary of modernism, but also Bourgeois’s relationship to people she had left behind in France…” (F. Morris, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. 208). Indeed Bourgeois herself described the Personages that she produced during this decade as the physical manifestations of the spirit of the people she had left behind. One art historian, Mignon Nixon, going so far as to say that Bourgeois “inscribed a work of mourning at the level of making, implying, through physical cutting, a psychical process of determined and painstaking achievement” (M. Nixon, “Psychoanalysis, Louise Bourgeois and Reconstruction,” quoted in F. Morris, ibid., p. 229).
Bourgeois’ sculptures time and again underscore the artist’s penchant for autobiographical references and her role within her family. In her youth, Bourgeois shared an intimate bond with her mother—a woman she described as “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful” and she was greatly affected by her mother’s illness and untimely death in 1932 (L. Bourgeois, Ode à ma mere, Paris, 1995, p. 62). The artist had a much more difficult relationship with her father, a charming philanderer, whose inappropriate advances toward various women and rather conspicuous 10-year affair with Bourgeois’ English tutor led to a household ruptured by secrets, deception, infidelity and wounded feelings. Given Bourgeois’ background, the tall upright form captured in Breasted Woman thus gains additional meaning as it suggests a woman of confidence, even in the face of difficulty.
Her father’s duplicitousness left Bourgeois with the lasting impression that men were characteristically weak, yet it also propelled her lifelong search for father figures amongst her artistic role models, which included Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brâncuși. With their vibrant presences and thoughtful installations, Bourgeois’ sculptures show the influence of all three artists; however, the sculpture’s anthropomorphized look and ability to convey emotion and wit through skilled manipulation of physical form most closely approaches Brâncuși’s expressive legacy, and such iconic works as The Bird in Space and Princess X.
Breasted Woman is a powerful work from what is probably one of the most significant bodies of work in twentieth century sculpture. Her opposing dualities—such as comfort and discomfort, attraction and aversion—explores how those opposing forces play out not just in familial drama, but also in the grander scope of humanity. As Bourgeois scholar Penelope Vinding succinctly explains, “Despite the personal starting-point [sic], Bourgeois’ works are rooted within a shared human horizon of experience. We recognize the existential themes like life/death, man/woman, love/hate, loneliness/belonging etc.; themes that are part of every society, and which are associated with strong, often ambivalent emotions. Bourgeois’ personal drama is only the core around which they are played out” (P. Vinding, “The Space and the Body,” in Louise Bourgeois: Life into Art, Louisiana, 2003, p. 12).
Standing just over four feet tall, this totemic figure is comprised of a vertical arrangement of protruding, semi-biological forms. Emanating from the metal base, this progression begins with two, almost spherical objects, upon which the other forms are placed. Gradually elongating as the eye moves up the work, these elements become more and more biomorphic before, at the mid-point, one of the sections splits into two adjoining parts, thus becoming the most apparent breast-like of the elements of the work’s title. Continuing to the upper portion of the work, the elements become large and flatter—more mask-like even—until they are crowned with a magnificent triangular pediment which is open at its core to reveal a further dimension—that of space.
Executed in bronze (one of the most traditional sculptural mediums), this work possess both physical and metaphorical historical resonance in abundance. The bronze gives the sculpture an elegance and majesty that is common with the great sculptures of history, while the high textured surface of the wooden original remains, imbuing it with a tactility and intimacy that can only come from a hand created work. Conceived in 1949-1950, Bourgeois first executed Breasted Woman in wood, keeping it in her own private collection until 1991 when she cast the subsequent edition of six (plus one artist’s proof) in bronze. The importance of this particular form to the artist can thus be seen not only in the lifelong relationship that she formed with the object, but also her ultimate ambition to preserve it in bronze.
Breasted Woman was conceived during a pivotal decade for the artist. She moved to New York from Paris in 1938 with her new husband, the distinguished art historian Robert Goldwater. During the subsequent decade, her life had undergone great upheaval as not only had she become a mother, but she also suffered from periods of severe homesickness after being separated from her friends and family in France. Here she was, in a new city and surrounded almost exclusively by the predominantly male Abstract Expressionists. Thus her upright forms “reflect not only the forms of the surrounding skyscrapers, and therefore the vocabulary of modernism, but also Bourgeois’s relationship to people she had left behind in France…” (F. Morris, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. 208). Indeed Bourgeois herself described the Personages that she produced during this decade as the physical manifestations of the spirit of the people she had left behind. One art historian, Mignon Nixon, going so far as to say that Bourgeois “inscribed a work of mourning at the level of making, implying, through physical cutting, a psychical process of determined and painstaking achievement” (M. Nixon, “Psychoanalysis, Louise Bourgeois and Reconstruction,” quoted in F. Morris, ibid., p. 229).
Bourgeois’ sculptures time and again underscore the artist’s penchant for autobiographical references and her role within her family. In her youth, Bourgeois shared an intimate bond with her mother—a woman she described as “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful” and she was greatly affected by her mother’s illness and untimely death in 1932 (L. Bourgeois, Ode à ma mere, Paris, 1995, p. 62). The artist had a much more difficult relationship with her father, a charming philanderer, whose inappropriate advances toward various women and rather conspicuous 10-year affair with Bourgeois’ English tutor led to a household ruptured by secrets, deception, infidelity and wounded feelings. Given Bourgeois’ background, the tall upright form captured in Breasted Woman thus gains additional meaning as it suggests a woman of confidence, even in the face of difficulty.
Her father’s duplicitousness left Bourgeois with the lasting impression that men were characteristically weak, yet it also propelled her lifelong search for father figures amongst her artistic role models, which included Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brâncuși. With their vibrant presences and thoughtful installations, Bourgeois’ sculptures show the influence of all three artists; however, the sculpture’s anthropomorphized look and ability to convey emotion and wit through skilled manipulation of physical form most closely approaches Brâncuși’s expressive legacy, and such iconic works as The Bird in Space and Princess X.
Breasted Woman is a powerful work from what is probably one of the most significant bodies of work in twentieth century sculpture. Her opposing dualities—such as comfort and discomfort, attraction and aversion—explores how those opposing forces play out not just in familial drama, but also in the grander scope of humanity. As Bourgeois scholar Penelope Vinding succinctly explains, “Despite the personal starting-point [sic], Bourgeois’ works are rooted within a shared human horizon of experience. We recognize the existential themes like life/death, man/woman, love/hate, loneliness/belonging etc.; themes that are part of every society, and which are associated with strong, often ambivalent emotions. Bourgeois’ personal drama is only the core around which they are played out” (P. Vinding, “The Space and the Body,” in Louise Bourgeois: Life into Art, Louisiana, 2003, p. 12).