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Lot Essay
‘All my work is suggestive; it is not explicit. Explicit things are not interesting because they are too cut and dried and without mystery’
—L. BOURGEOIS
‘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
Louise Bourgeois’ Janus in Leather Jacket revolves slowly, suspended between dualities: male and female, solid and fragile, threatening and vulnerable, this darkly beautiful work majestically articulates the central themes of Bourgeois’ oeuvre. Conceived in 1968 when the artist travelled to Pietrasanta, Italy, to work in marble and bronze, and cast in 1992, this is one of four variations from her hanging Janus series. Distinct from Janus fleuri (1969), housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where two phallic forms conjoin at a raw labial fissure, Janus in Leather Jacket is clothed in a lustrous mantle whose blade-sharp edges offset the swelling, organic paired forms beneath. Its uneasy equilibrium and unnerving, primal physicality conjure all the fascination of the emotional and psychosexual forces that drive Bourgeois’ work. Another edition of Janus in Leather Jacket has been exhibited globally at the Reina Sofía, Madrid; Dia:Beacon, New York; the Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon; and the Kunstmuseum, Bern. The sculpture was also included in the artist’s 2010 retrospective which travelled to Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Janus is the two-faced Roman god of oppositions, gates, openings, transitions, beginnings, and endings. Bourgeois translates this uniquely ambiguous entity into a sensual presence, melding opposites together: the clitoris/phalluses seem at once limp and tumescent, hanging helplessly yet poised like pincers. Playfully cloaking this entity in a ‘leather jacket,’ Bourgeois heightens a sense of obscuring and revelation, the idea of leather – enhanced in the bronze’s dark patina – adding a quiet hint of fetishism. The work’s ambivalence is heightened by its suspension from a wire, which offers a constantly shifting viewpoint as it freely rotates. ‘Hanging is important,’ Bourgeois has said, ‘because it allows things to turn around. It is very helpless, it changes the hierarchy of the work; the base disappears’ (L. Bourgeois, quoted in F. Bonami, ‘In a Strange Way, Things are Getting Better and Better,’ Flash Art vol. XXVII no. 174, January 1994, p. 39). Revolving and pendulous, the work presents a ’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). This Janus thus remains open and closed, seductive and frightening, hidden and revealing at once.
In tune with the autobiographical tenor of Bourgeois’ work, Janus in Leather Jacket bodies forth a formal unity wrought from emotional tumult. Continually bringing her past into Janus-like conversation with the present, many of her works relate to the difficult relationship she had with her philandering father and long-suffering mother. This resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality that is evident in her very earliest work, and was articulated ever more eloquently as her practice developed over the decades. As with many of her works, Janus in Leather Jacket is both a form of self-portrait and an exorcism, a psychological interior made outward. In its appendages there are echoes of the iconic spider motif that represents her mother in monumental works such as Maman (1999), while its uncertain gender morphology can also be seen in the marble sculpture Sleep II (1967). As Bourgeois 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 shapes – clusters 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). For all its visual wit, Janus in Leather Jacket is a profound existential apparition balanced elegantly at the intersections of sex, life, art and subconscious.
—L. BOURGEOIS
‘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
Louise Bourgeois’ Janus in Leather Jacket revolves slowly, suspended between dualities: male and female, solid and fragile, threatening and vulnerable, this darkly beautiful work majestically articulates the central themes of Bourgeois’ oeuvre. Conceived in 1968 when the artist travelled to Pietrasanta, Italy, to work in marble and bronze, and cast in 1992, this is one of four variations from her hanging Janus series. Distinct from Janus fleuri (1969), housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where two phallic forms conjoin at a raw labial fissure, Janus in Leather Jacket is clothed in a lustrous mantle whose blade-sharp edges offset the swelling, organic paired forms beneath. Its uneasy equilibrium and unnerving, primal physicality conjure all the fascination of the emotional and psychosexual forces that drive Bourgeois’ work. Another edition of Janus in Leather Jacket has been exhibited globally at the Reina Sofía, Madrid; Dia:Beacon, New York; the Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon; and the Kunstmuseum, Bern. The sculpture was also included in the artist’s 2010 retrospective which travelled to Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Janus is the two-faced Roman god of oppositions, gates, openings, transitions, beginnings, and endings. Bourgeois translates this uniquely ambiguous entity into a sensual presence, melding opposites together: the clitoris/phalluses seem at once limp and tumescent, hanging helplessly yet poised like pincers. Playfully cloaking this entity in a ‘leather jacket,’ Bourgeois heightens a sense of obscuring and revelation, the idea of leather – enhanced in the bronze’s dark patina – adding a quiet hint of fetishism. The work’s ambivalence is heightened by its suspension from a wire, which offers a constantly shifting viewpoint as it freely rotates. ‘Hanging is important,’ Bourgeois has said, ‘because it allows things to turn around. It is very helpless, it changes the hierarchy of the work; the base disappears’ (L. Bourgeois, quoted in F. Bonami, ‘In a Strange Way, Things are Getting Better and Better,’ Flash Art vol. XXVII no. 174, January 1994, p. 39). Revolving and pendulous, the work presents a ’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). This Janus thus remains open and closed, seductive and frightening, hidden and revealing at once.
In tune with the autobiographical tenor of Bourgeois’ work, Janus in Leather Jacket bodies forth a formal unity wrought from emotional tumult. Continually bringing her past into Janus-like conversation with the present, many of her works relate to the difficult relationship she had with her philandering father and long-suffering mother. This resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality that is evident in her very earliest work, and was articulated ever more eloquently as her practice developed over the decades. As with many of her works, Janus in Leather Jacket is both a form of self-portrait and an exorcism, a psychological interior made outward. In its appendages there are echoes of the iconic spider motif that represents her mother in monumental works such as Maman (1999), while its uncertain gender morphology can also be seen in the marble sculpture Sleep II (1967). As Bourgeois 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 shapes – clusters 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). For all its visual wit, Janus in Leather Jacket is a profound existential apparition balanced elegantly at the intersections of sex, life, art and subconscious.