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Lot Essay
'Janus is a reference to the kind of polarity we represent. The polarity I experience is a drive toward extreme violence and revolt and a retiring I wouldn't say passivity but a need for peace, a complete peace with the self, with others, and with the environment' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 75).
Cast in bronze and suspended from the ceiling, the lustrous dark and polished patina of the Louise Bourgeois' Janus sculptures catches the light as it orbits. Conceived in 1968, when the artist traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy to work in marble and bronze and cast in 1992, the present work is one of four variations from the hanging Janus series. Distinguishing itself from Janus fleuri of 1969, housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where the phalluses conjoin in an almost monstrous spectacle of buckling bronze, in Janus in Leather Jacket, the cumul mounds adjoin under an unyielding metallic armament, its razor edges in sharp contrast to the swelling, organic forms which curl inwards. Another edition of Janus in Leather Jacket has been exhibited in several exhibitions globally included at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Dia Center for the Arts, Beacon, New York; Musée d'art Contemporain, Lyon and Kunstmuseum, Bern - the most notable being the artist's retrospective in 2010 which travelled to Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Taking its name from the two-faced Roman god of oppositions, Janus in Leather Jacket embodies the inherent tension and interconnectivity between the two separate genders. Looking from left to right, two amorphous poles in Janus in Leather Jacket oscillate from male and female, embodying the intrinsic ambiguity and permutations of sexual oppositions. A visual pun on male and female, the anthropomorphic ovids of Janus in Leather Jacket evoke both male and female sexuality, inciting a curious incertitude and gender ambiguity that is inherent in the very best examples of Bourgeois' work such as the 1967 marble sculpture Sleep II, housed in the renown Easton Foundation Collection.
The act of hanging her sculptures is of particular importance to the artist which she employed as a formal strategy, further accentuating its vulnerability and intensifying the state of fluctuation in which her works exist. By suspending her works, the sculptures are free to rotate, offering a constantly shifting vantage point. As the artist wrote, 'the form traced in the air by these motions is the spiral, with its double movement of turning inwards (signifying retreat and withdrawal) and outwards (signifying acceptance, an opening up to life)' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. xx). Suspended at eye level from the ceiling, Janus in Leather Jacket is simultaneously pendulous yet affixed, the permanence of its material juxtaposed against the ever shifting angle emphasizes the ambiguity present in all her work. As Bourgeois stated, 'horizontality is a desire to give up to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence and doubt' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. xx).
The darkly polished bulbous forms bow sleepily, providing a counterbalance to the virility of Brancusi's Princesse X. An immensely sensual sculpture which explores the incongruences between the sexes, the artist has described the work as 'perhaps a self-portrait - one of many' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Art Now, no. 7, New York, September, 1969, unpaged). Many of the forms Bourgeois adopted were autobiographical in nature and related to the difficult relationship she had with her philandering father and the adoration she felt for her long suffering mother. This resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality, as she once explained, 'since I am exclusively concerned, at least consciously, with formal perfection, I allow myself to follow blindly the images that suggest themselves to me. There has always been sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapesclusters of breasts like clouds-but often I merge the imagery-phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive' (L. Bourgeois, quoted by D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, New York 1982, pp. 26-27). Elegantly balancing the modalities of its suspended arrangement, Janus in Leather Jacket remains a compelling portrayal of imploding and volatile sexuality.
Cast in bronze and suspended from the ceiling, the lustrous dark and polished patina of the Louise Bourgeois' Janus sculptures catches the light as it orbits. Conceived in 1968, when the artist traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy to work in marble and bronze and cast in 1992, the present work is one of four variations from the hanging Janus series. Distinguishing itself from Janus fleuri of 1969, housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where the phalluses conjoin in an almost monstrous spectacle of buckling bronze, in Janus in Leather Jacket, the cumul mounds adjoin under an unyielding metallic armament, its razor edges in sharp contrast to the swelling, organic forms which curl inwards. Another edition of Janus in Leather Jacket has been exhibited in several exhibitions globally included at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Dia Center for the Arts, Beacon, New York; Musée d'art Contemporain, Lyon and Kunstmuseum, Bern - the most notable being the artist's retrospective in 2010 which travelled to Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Taking its name from the two-faced Roman god of oppositions, Janus in Leather Jacket embodies the inherent tension and interconnectivity between the two separate genders. Looking from left to right, two amorphous poles in Janus in Leather Jacket oscillate from male and female, embodying the intrinsic ambiguity and permutations of sexual oppositions. A visual pun on male and female, the anthropomorphic ovids of Janus in Leather Jacket evoke both male and female sexuality, inciting a curious incertitude and gender ambiguity that is inherent in the very best examples of Bourgeois' work such as the 1967 marble sculpture Sleep II, housed in the renown Easton Foundation Collection.
The act of hanging her sculptures is of particular importance to the artist which she employed as a formal strategy, further accentuating its vulnerability and intensifying the state of fluctuation in which her works exist. By suspending her works, the sculptures are free to rotate, offering a constantly shifting vantage point. As the artist wrote, 'the form traced in the air by these motions is the spiral, with its double movement of turning inwards (signifying retreat and withdrawal) and outwards (signifying acceptance, an opening up to life)' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. xx). Suspended at eye level from the ceiling, Janus in Leather Jacket is simultaneously pendulous yet affixed, the permanence of its material juxtaposed against the ever shifting angle emphasizes the ambiguity present in all her work. As Bourgeois stated, 'horizontality is a desire to give up to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence and doubt' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2007, p. xx).
The darkly polished bulbous forms bow sleepily, providing a counterbalance to the virility of Brancusi's Princesse X. An immensely sensual sculpture which explores the incongruences between the sexes, the artist has described the work as 'perhaps a self-portrait - one of many' (L. Bourgeois, quoted in Art Now, no. 7, New York, September, 1969, unpaged). Many of the forms Bourgeois adopted were autobiographical in nature and related to the difficult relationship she had with her philandering father and the adoration she felt for her long suffering mother. This resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality, as she once explained, 'since I am exclusively concerned, at least consciously, with formal perfection, I allow myself to follow blindly the images that suggest themselves to me. There has always been sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapesclusters of breasts like clouds-but often I merge the imagery-phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive' (L. Bourgeois, quoted by D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, New York 1982, pp. 26-27). Elegantly balancing the modalities of its suspended arrangement, Janus in Leather Jacket remains a compelling portrayal of imploding and volatile sexuality.