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Lot Essay
Louise Bourgeois’s totemic sculpture Black Flames is emblematic of the evocative and mysterious forms that the artist produced throughout her life. Evoking the upright silhouette of her iconic Personage sculptures, which were executed during the same period, the present work exudes an existential presence that exists far in excess of its physical dimensions. The organic form along with its tactile surface creates an object that yearns to be touched, yet its darkly ominous palette and flame-like form creates a portentous atmosphere—a dichotomy that is present in the very best examples of the artist’s work.
Standing nearly six-feet tall, Black Flames soars upwards towards the sky. Emerging from the ground, Bourgeois assembles an assortment of geometric and animate forms that speak to her own lived experience. Rigorous lines sit next to supple curves, in what the artist herself called, “the duel between the isolated individual and… shared awareness. At first…,” she continued, “I made single figures without any freedom at all… Later tiny windows started appear...” (quoted in J. Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois: The Early Works, exh. cat., Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, 2002, p. 34). Black Flames is symptomatic of these new forms, its tall vertical reach punctuated by a single open “window” near the center of the work.
The clustering and twisting, together with the juxtaposed and fissured elements, creates a self-generating volatility in the work’s varying weights and densities, as if disjunctive forms are compressed into a narrative sequence. These seemingly incongruent modules create a spiraling sense of ascent, as the heat from the flame rises, taking us with it. Reinterpreting the anthropomorphic shape as a series of conspicuously unstable disparate parts, slightly askew, there is, nevertheless, a pleasing rhythmic surge as the form reaches the pinnacle. Separated segments are expressive as well as sensitive to the enclosing space, eliciting a relationship of positive and negative where the interstices beckon the viewer to approach, creating a reciprocal responsiveness, in the sense that Bourgeois has expressed, where “the emotional responsiveness of the separate but interlocking parts” exist permanently (“Taped Interview,” 1979, in D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1983, p. 23).
Although intentionally abstract and resolutely non-figurative, Bourgeois did admit that these sculptures were also reminiscent of individuals—or at least the psychological entities contained within them. These are works which stand at the height of an average person at slightly over five feet tall, and were “conceived of and functioned as figures, each given a personality by its shape and articulation, and responding to one another. They were life-size in a real space…” (quoted in J. Helfenstein, “Personnages: Animism versus Modernist Sculpture,” in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2007, p. 207). The early loss of her mother and a difficult relationship with her father meant that the artist often found it difficult to maintain intimate and lasting relationships with other people. Yet, cast in bronze, these enigmatic forms are designed to evoke the whole range of human emotions. “The psychological tension between intimacy and isolation, between silence and dialogue becomes the starting point” (ibid., p. 207).Black Flames, together with her other upright sculptural forms are among Bourgeois’s most celebrated works. With clear parallels to the stacked forms of Constantin Brancusi, this work has been widely exhibited and cited in literature about the artist. A unique wooden version of the present work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Personal experience and artistic expression are inextricably entwined in Bourgeois’s art; building on her own deeply felt experiences and her extraordinary aesthetic imagination, she created works that convey universal feelings of desire, anxiety and distress. Bourgeois has declared, “In my sculpture, it's not an image I'm seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism” (quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Works in Marble, exh. cat., Galerie Hauser and Wirth, Munich, 2002, p. 20).
Standing nearly six-feet tall, Black Flames soars upwards towards the sky. Emerging from the ground, Bourgeois assembles an assortment of geometric and animate forms that speak to her own lived experience. Rigorous lines sit next to supple curves, in what the artist herself called, “the duel between the isolated individual and… shared awareness. At first…,” she continued, “I made single figures without any freedom at all… Later tiny windows started appear...” (quoted in J. Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois: The Early Works, exh. cat., Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, 2002, p. 34). Black Flames is symptomatic of these new forms, its tall vertical reach punctuated by a single open “window” near the center of the work.
The clustering and twisting, together with the juxtaposed and fissured elements, creates a self-generating volatility in the work’s varying weights and densities, as if disjunctive forms are compressed into a narrative sequence. These seemingly incongruent modules create a spiraling sense of ascent, as the heat from the flame rises, taking us with it. Reinterpreting the anthropomorphic shape as a series of conspicuously unstable disparate parts, slightly askew, there is, nevertheless, a pleasing rhythmic surge as the form reaches the pinnacle. Separated segments are expressive as well as sensitive to the enclosing space, eliciting a relationship of positive and negative where the interstices beckon the viewer to approach, creating a reciprocal responsiveness, in the sense that Bourgeois has expressed, where “the emotional responsiveness of the separate but interlocking parts” exist permanently (“Taped Interview,” 1979, in D. Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1983, p. 23).
Although intentionally abstract and resolutely non-figurative, Bourgeois did admit that these sculptures were also reminiscent of individuals—or at least the psychological entities contained within them. These are works which stand at the height of an average person at slightly over five feet tall, and were “conceived of and functioned as figures, each given a personality by its shape and articulation, and responding to one another. They were life-size in a real space…” (quoted in J. Helfenstein, “Personnages: Animism versus Modernist Sculpture,” in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2007, p. 207). The early loss of her mother and a difficult relationship with her father meant that the artist often found it difficult to maintain intimate and lasting relationships with other people. Yet, cast in bronze, these enigmatic forms are designed to evoke the whole range of human emotions. “The psychological tension between intimacy and isolation, between silence and dialogue becomes the starting point” (ibid., p. 207).Black Flames, together with her other upright sculptural forms are among Bourgeois’s most celebrated works. With clear parallels to the stacked forms of Constantin Brancusi, this work has been widely exhibited and cited in literature about the artist. A unique wooden version of the present work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Personal experience and artistic expression are inextricably entwined in Bourgeois’s art; building on her own deeply felt experiences and her extraordinary aesthetic imagination, she created works that convey universal feelings of desire, anxiety and distress. Bourgeois has declared, “In my sculpture, it's not an image I'm seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism” (quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Works in Marble, exh. cat., Galerie Hauser and Wirth, Munich, 2002, p. 20).