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Lot Essay
‘I bought my first Louise Bourgeois work in 1991, and found myself responding with my feminine side’ (Adam Clayton)
Offered from the collection of Adam Clayton, acclaimed bass guitarist of the iconic rock band U2, Untitled is an elegant work from Louise Bourgeois’ seminal sculptural series of Personages. As is typical of the series, the work was cast in bronze from an initial sculpture carved from a found piece of balsa wood. It preserves in cool, gleaming metal the earlier form’s rippled grain and grooves. Each sphere is subtly imprecise and unique; marks left in the material before Bourgeois began carving remain as traces of a previous life. The wood’s visible growth-rings—like the looping ridges of a fingerprint—suggest the passing of time. Bourgeois scaled the Personages according to her own height, and in early exhibitions of the series they were arranged in small groups, pairs, or alone, inhabiting the gallery space like partygoers. Works from the series reside in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, whose founding director Alfred Barr was among the first to recognise their singular visual force when he acquired Sleeping Figure (1950) in 1951. Examples from the edition of the present work have been seen in museum exhibitions worldwide, including at the Aspen Art Museum (2002) and the Yokohama Museum of Art (1997-1998); the wood version is in the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Clayton first encountered a work by Bourgeois on a trip to New York in the early 1990s. ‘I never realised that sculpture could move me, and I was so affected by this piece that I bought it’, he recalled (A. Clayton quoted in R. Greenstreet, ‘The Q&A: U2 bassist Adam Clayton’, The Guardian, 7 December 2024). This was to be the first of several purchases. Clayton acquired the present work directly from the artist’s studio in 2001, the year after it was made. ‘I bought my first Louise Bourgeois work in 1991,’ he explains, ‘and found myself responding with my feminine side. Louise’s work was just so feminine despite her use of masculine materials like bronze, stone, marble and wood. It spoke to me in a more intimate and nurturing voice than many monumental, testosterone-driven works by male artists.’
The Personages first emerged in the 1940s. In 1938, Bourgeois moved from her native Paris to New York with her husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater. In 1941, as their young family grew, the couple moved to an apartment on 142 East 18th Street in Manhattan, where they would remain until 1958. The building had a vast mansard roof which Bourgeois soon began using as a plein air studio. Looking out across the skyline of the city, Bourgeois—whose practice to that point had been dominated by drawing—began to work in sculpture, the medium which would ultimately define her singular oeuvre across some six decades. At the time, she was grappling with her various roles as wife, mother, and artist, the latter within the context of the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement dominating the New York art world at the time. The quasi-human Personages articulated feelings of loneliness and homesickness for the country she had left behind. ‘A friend asked me what I was doing,’ she said of the early Personages. ‘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).
Inspired by the solid geometry of Manhattan, the slender Personages developed in three dimensions ideas explored in Bourgeois’s earlier drawing series such as Femme Maison (1945-1947) and He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), which explored the figural union of body and building. The Personages also looked back to the intellectual ferment of 1930s Paris, relating to the Brâncuși’s modernist abstraction and to the ambiguous forms of Surrealist and Metaphysical painting. In their relationship to architecture, they drew on the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, both of whom were integral to the development of Surrealism. The former’s analogy of the dream house had conceived of the home as a symbolic psychic body, while Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis comprised an architecture-like excavation of the inner psyche.
For Bourgeois, the Personages were animated by the tension they evoked between the isolated individual and the interdependence of the group. Reflecting the artist’s experience of isolation on first moving to New York, the earliest examples were ‘blind houses without any openings, any relation to the outside world’. Moving from interiority to an acknowledgement of the ways in which people are bound together, ‘tiny windows started to appear’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Design Quarterly, no. 30, 1954, p. 18). The mirror at the present work’s pinnacle suggests one such window. Like the skyscrapers which surrounded Bourgeois’ Manhattan studio, whose shimmering glass facades reflected and refracted those of their neighbours, the tiny pane reflects the sculpture’s environment and reveals the people who share it.
The mirror, piercing the apex of the slender, pillar-like form, is also reminiscent of the eye of a needle. Bourgeois’s oeuvre is pervaded by metaphors related to sewing and mending, a reference to her parents’ antique tapestry restoration workshop in Aubusson, France, where Bourgeois grew up. The figure of the mother looms across Bourgeois’s body of work, notably in the monumental Spiders which became a significant sculptural theme in her later career. Forged during the years when Bourgeois had herself recently become a mother, the motif of the needle in the Personages becomes a maternal imago, redolent of the attention, care, and strength inherent to motherhood.
In an article written in 1990 by Bourgeois on the collecting habits of Sigmund Freud, the artist reflected on a collection gathered by her own father. ‘It was a box and inside there were pebbles,’ she writes. ‘There were hundreds of pebbles, and he had it on his desk. He said, “Every time I have a beautiful moment, it proves to me that life is worth living, and in gratitude I put a pebble in the box.” So he was collecting beautiful moments’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Freud’s Toys’, Artforum, vol. 28, no. 5, January 1990). Like a cairn of pebbles smoothed by the sea, the present work might be the artist’s own monument to beautiful moments.
Offered from the collection of Adam Clayton, acclaimed bass guitarist of the iconic rock band U2, Untitled is an elegant work from Louise Bourgeois’ seminal sculptural series of Personages. As is typical of the series, the work was cast in bronze from an initial sculpture carved from a found piece of balsa wood. It preserves in cool, gleaming metal the earlier form’s rippled grain and grooves. Each sphere is subtly imprecise and unique; marks left in the material before Bourgeois began carving remain as traces of a previous life. The wood’s visible growth-rings—like the looping ridges of a fingerprint—suggest the passing of time. Bourgeois scaled the Personages according to her own height, and in early exhibitions of the series they were arranged in small groups, pairs, or alone, inhabiting the gallery space like partygoers. Works from the series reside in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, whose founding director Alfred Barr was among the first to recognise their singular visual force when he acquired Sleeping Figure (1950) in 1951. Examples from the edition of the present work have been seen in museum exhibitions worldwide, including at the Aspen Art Museum (2002) and the Yokohama Museum of Art (1997-1998); the wood version is in the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Clayton first encountered a work by Bourgeois on a trip to New York in the early 1990s. ‘I never realised that sculpture could move me, and I was so affected by this piece that I bought it’, he recalled (A. Clayton quoted in R. Greenstreet, ‘The Q&A: U2 bassist Adam Clayton’, The Guardian, 7 December 2024). This was to be the first of several purchases. Clayton acquired the present work directly from the artist’s studio in 2001, the year after it was made. ‘I bought my first Louise Bourgeois work in 1991,’ he explains, ‘and found myself responding with my feminine side. Louise’s work was just so feminine despite her use of masculine materials like bronze, stone, marble and wood. It spoke to me in a more intimate and nurturing voice than many monumental, testosterone-driven works by male artists.’
The Personages first emerged in the 1940s. In 1938, Bourgeois moved from her native Paris to New York with her husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater. In 1941, as their young family grew, the couple moved to an apartment on 142 East 18th Street in Manhattan, where they would remain until 1958. The building had a vast mansard roof which Bourgeois soon began using as a plein air studio. Looking out across the skyline of the city, Bourgeois—whose practice to that point had been dominated by drawing—began to work in sculpture, the medium which would ultimately define her singular oeuvre across some six decades. At the time, she was grappling with her various roles as wife, mother, and artist, the latter within the context of the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement dominating the New York art world at the time. The quasi-human Personages articulated feelings of loneliness and homesickness for the country she had left behind. ‘A friend asked me what I was doing,’ she said of the early Personages. ‘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).
Inspired by the solid geometry of Manhattan, the slender Personages developed in three dimensions ideas explored in Bourgeois’s earlier drawing series such as Femme Maison (1945-1947) and He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), which explored the figural union of body and building. The Personages also looked back to the intellectual ferment of 1930s Paris, relating to the Brâncuși’s modernist abstraction and to the ambiguous forms of Surrealist and Metaphysical painting. In their relationship to architecture, they drew on the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, both of whom were integral to the development of Surrealism. The former’s analogy of the dream house had conceived of the home as a symbolic psychic body, while Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis comprised an architecture-like excavation of the inner psyche.
For Bourgeois, the Personages were animated by the tension they evoked between the isolated individual and the interdependence of the group. Reflecting the artist’s experience of isolation on first moving to New York, the earliest examples were ‘blind houses without any openings, any relation to the outside world’. Moving from interiority to an acknowledgement of the ways in which people are bound together, ‘tiny windows started to appear’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Design Quarterly, no. 30, 1954, p. 18). The mirror at the present work’s pinnacle suggests one such window. Like the skyscrapers which surrounded Bourgeois’ Manhattan studio, whose shimmering glass facades reflected and refracted those of their neighbours, the tiny pane reflects the sculpture’s environment and reveals the people who share it.
The mirror, piercing the apex of the slender, pillar-like form, is also reminiscent of the eye of a needle. Bourgeois’s oeuvre is pervaded by metaphors related to sewing and mending, a reference to her parents’ antique tapestry restoration workshop in Aubusson, France, where Bourgeois grew up. The figure of the mother looms across Bourgeois’s body of work, notably in the monumental Spiders which became a significant sculptural theme in her later career. Forged during the years when Bourgeois had herself recently become a mother, the motif of the needle in the Personages becomes a maternal imago, redolent of the attention, care, and strength inherent to motherhood.
In an article written in 1990 by Bourgeois on the collecting habits of Sigmund Freud, the artist reflected on a collection gathered by her own father. ‘It was a box and inside there were pebbles,’ she writes. ‘There were hundreds of pebbles, and he had it on his desk. He said, “Every time I have a beautiful moment, it proves to me that life is worth living, and in gratitude I put a pebble in the box.” So he was collecting beautiful moments’ (L. Bourgeois, ‘Freud’s Toys’, Artforum, vol. 28, no. 5, January 1990). Like a cairn of pebbles smoothed by the sea, the present work might be the artist’s own monument to beautiful moments.