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Lot Essay
A mirrored pair of swelling, organic forms clothed in a lustrous, sharp-edged mantle, Louise Bourgeois’s hanging bronze Janus in Leather Jacket revolves slowly in space. Its merger of sexual symbols—collapsing such polarities as male and female, penis and breast, soft and hard—is typical of the artist’s work, which takes a deep dive into the fundamental forms of the human psyche. Conceived in 1968 after Bourgeois’s first visit to Pietrasanta, Italy—a transitional moment for her work in marble and bronze—it is one of four important works from her Janus series, alongside Janus, Hanging Janus with Jacket and Janus fleuri (versions in Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Named for the two-faced Roman god of oppositions, gates, openings, transitions and beginnings, these nuanced bronzes are charged with the primal physicality, emotive presence and psychosexual intrigue that define Bourgeois’s sculptural practice.
As befits its titular deity, Janus in Leather Jacket is a body of oppositions. Juxtaposed with the sharp wings of the ‘leather jacket’, the work’s soft appendages appear both limp and tumescent, hanging vulnerably yet poised like pincers. By sheathing the object in this garment, Bourgeois introduces a sense of obscuring and revelation, with the idea of leather—enhanced in the bronze’s dark patina—adding a playful hint of fetishism. The major 2022 retrospective Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at the Hayward Gallery, London, examined the role of textiles and clothing in her work, and Janus in Leather Jacket can be seen to invoke similar narrative themes of costume and self-portraiture. Hanging from a thread with its claw-like palps, it also echoes the iconic spider motif that represents Bourgeois’s mother in monumental works such as Maman (1999), which figure the arachnid as a benevolent weaver.
The sculpture’s ambiguity is heightened by its suspension from a wire, which offers a constantly shifting viewpoint as it 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). Unfixed and metamorphic, the work spins freely back and forth, presenting 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 Modern, London 2007, p. xx).
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. These events resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality that is evident in her very earliest work, and was articulated ever more eloquently as she explored the overlapping roles of artist, mother and wife over the following decades. Janus in Leather Jacket brings together these ideas in a complex of dualities: it is at once open and closed, seductive and threatening, rawly revealing and deeply enigmatic. Poised at the intersections of sex, life, art and subconscious, it can be seen as a form of physical autobiography, bringing the ambiguous shapes of an emotional interior into the world, and containing—like a chrysalis—both the past and the future.
As befits its titular deity, Janus in Leather Jacket is a body of oppositions. Juxtaposed with the sharp wings of the ‘leather jacket’, the work’s soft appendages appear both limp and tumescent, hanging vulnerably yet poised like pincers. By sheathing the object in this garment, Bourgeois introduces a sense of obscuring and revelation, with the idea of leather—enhanced in the bronze’s dark patina—adding a playful hint of fetishism. The major 2022 retrospective Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at the Hayward Gallery, London, examined the role of textiles and clothing in her work, and Janus in Leather Jacket can be seen to invoke similar narrative themes of costume and self-portraiture. Hanging from a thread with its claw-like palps, it also echoes the iconic spider motif that represents Bourgeois’s mother in monumental works such as Maman (1999), which figure the arachnid as a benevolent weaver.
The sculpture’s ambiguity is heightened by its suspension from a wire, which offers a constantly shifting viewpoint as it 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). Unfixed and metamorphic, the work spins freely back and forth, presenting 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 Modern, London 2007, p. xx).
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. These events resulted in a conflicting sense of her own sexuality that is evident in her very earliest work, and was articulated ever more eloquently as she explored the overlapping roles of artist, mother and wife over the following decades. Janus in Leather Jacket brings together these ideas in a complex of dualities: it is at once open and closed, seductive and threatening, rawly revealing and deeply enigmatic. Poised at the intersections of sex, life, art and subconscious, it can be seen as a form of physical autobiography, bringing the ambiguous shapes of an emotional interior into the world, and containing—like a chrysalis—both the past and the future.