Needle Woman

A slender, totemic form rising organically from the ground, Needle Woman is an elegant example of Louise Bourgeois’s Personages. The artist considered this group of linear, human-sized sculptures—which were first conceived in the 1940s, and many of which today reside in major museums—her first mature sculptural achievement. In them, she explored the themes of family, solitude, creativity and loss that would remain central to her practice for the next six decades. They were carved in wood, and sometimes painted; the present work is a later cast in white-painted bronze. Tapered and softly curved at its base, Needle Woman balances as if weightless. A vertical aperture—the needle’s eye—slits its lower quarter, while a cinch towards its apex implies a stylised head. Evocative both of the ancient, primal symbolism of fertility idols and the attenuated modernism of Brâncuși or Giacometti, it exemplifies the combined formal grace and psychic potency that define Bourgeois’s practice.

Bourgeois’s autobiography played a vital role in her art, which has been described as a form of psychoanalysis. Traumatised as a child by her father’s affair with her English governess, and later by the illness and untimely death of her mother in 1932, she explored and reified her innermost feelings in her work. In reference to the family business—a tapestry restoration workshop in Aubusson, France, where she assisted with repairs from an early age—she frequently employed metaphors of sewing and mending. Some of her most iconic sculptures figure her mother as a vast, benevolent spider, and many others are constructed from textiles: the centrality of weaving to her work was surveyed in the major exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, held at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2022. In this light, Needle Woman might be seen to stand as a maternal presence, and perhaps also a self-portrait. For Bourgeois, the needle is a positive tool, able to restore the fabric of the past, to run a stitch through time, or to hold the pieces of a life together.

In 1938, newly married to the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois had moved from Paris to New York. They adopted a son in 1940; Bourgeois gave birth to a boy herself some months later, and another in 1941. The growing family moved into an apartment block on East 18^th Street in August that year. She took the building’s roof as an open-air studio, and it was here that her sculptural work began. ‘Suddenly I had this huge sky space to myself,’ Bourgeois recalled, ‘and I began doing these standing figures.’ The environment’s verticality seems to have informed the Personages, whose helixes, vertebral stacks, and skyscraper-like columns are as architectural as they are anthropomorphic. She named one work Portrait of Jean-Louis, for one of her young sons. Beyond reflecting on her present situation, however, the Personages represented the relationships Bourgeois had left behind in France. ‘A friend asked me what I was doing’, she said. ‘I told him, “I feel so lonely that I am rebuilding these people around me”’ (L. Bourgeois, quoted in M. Brenson, ‘A Sculptor Comes into Her Own’, The New York Times, 31 October 1982, p. 29).

Bourgeois unveiled her sculptures in three exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery, in 1949, 1950 and 1953: the wooden version of Needle Woman was shown in 1950. The Personages were arranged alone, in pairs, and in small, conversational clusters. Visitors could wander among them, in an early instance of what would later be called installation art. Standing as surrogate friends and family members, the Personages activated the gallery as a social space, and had an almost magical aura. ‘Their hooded, ghostlike quality,’ writes Lucy Lippard, ‘reminiscent of primitive ancestor totems, was indeed part of a private ritual by which Bourgeois could “summon all of the people I missed. I was not interested in details; I was interested in their physical presence. It was some kind of an encounter”’ (L. Lippard, ‘Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out’, Artforum, March 1975, p. 28). In Paris, Bourgeois had studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and the studio of Fernand Léger; she had made prints while at the Art Students’ League in New York. Following the Personages, it was sculpture, with its strength of physical ‘encounter’, and its ability to conjure what she called ‘fantastic reality’, that would come to define her work.

The Personages’ fine obelisks also take part in a knowing dialogue with Bourgeois’s artistic contemporaries. With their insistent narrative qualities, they trouble the abstract purity of artists like Brâncuși—whom she knew personally—and complicate surrealism’s interest in the ‘primitive’, which often brutalised or essentialised the female body. Indeed, with allusive details such as Needle Woman’s eye, Bourgeois subverted phallic silhouettes with feminine attributes. That she returned to her wooden Personages to cast them in permanent, enduring bronze—a process she began in the 1950s and continued across the decades—testifies to their foundational importance in her work. Needle Woman, its solitary form both delicate and steadfast, encapsulates the artist’s deeply personal themes in a universal image. Like a stem reaching upwards from the ground, it is rooted in its past but points to the future: as if merging body and mind with the needle, Bourgeois erects a monument to memory, to motherhood and to the healing power of her art.