.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work has been re-titled by the artist as Depression Woman in 1994.
Spoon-Woman is one of a celebrated group of wooden "figure" sculptures with which Louise Bourgeois made her sculptural debut at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949 between 1950.
Her ground-breaking show at the Peridot Gallery caused a sensation and established her as one of the most important sculptors of her generation. As she recalled, "Pierre Matisse and Duchamp came by and said, "This is extraordinary!" I told them it was simply a manifestation of "homesickness". They looked at each other and understood, that's all there was to it but, there is a great intensity and very great personal emotion. This is apparent in the constant repetition of the word 'figure' which expresses the fact that I had left my entire family in Europe. At bottom, I wasn't ashamed, but I was sick at having abandoned them because I was the only one to leave. I married an American student and left along with him. Thus my entire family remained in France and the homesickness was doubled by a sense of abandonment. I felt I had abandoned them," (cited in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, London, 2000, p. 177)
All executed on a human scale, Bourgeois' strange, haunting 'figures' are physical materialisations of unspecific personal emotions related to individual members of her family. They are not modern totems - as they were first understood to be in the all-pervasive and distinctly "heroic" climate of Abstract Expressionism current at the time - but archetypal manifestations of forces in Bourgeois' own unconscious that have been made concrete through the actions of the artist. In this sense they are truly primitive creations.
Fig. 1 Alberto Giacometti, Femme-Cuillère, 1926, bronze
Spoon-Woman is one of a celebrated group of wooden "figure" sculptures with which Louise Bourgeois made her sculptural debut at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949 between 1950.
Her ground-breaking show at the Peridot Gallery caused a sensation and established her as one of the most important sculptors of her generation. As she recalled, "Pierre Matisse and Duchamp came by and said, "This is extraordinary!" I told them it was simply a manifestation of "homesickness". They looked at each other and understood, that's all there was to it but, there is a great intensity and very great personal emotion. This is apparent in the constant repetition of the word 'figure' which expresses the fact that I had left my entire family in Europe. At bottom, I wasn't ashamed, but I was sick at having abandoned them because I was the only one to leave. I married an American student and left along with him. Thus my entire family remained in France and the homesickness was doubled by a sense of abandonment. I felt I had abandoned them," (cited in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, London, 2000, p. 177)
All executed on a human scale, Bourgeois' strange, haunting 'figures' are physical materialisations of unspecific personal emotions related to individual members of her family. They are not modern totems - as they were first understood to be in the all-pervasive and distinctly "heroic" climate of Abstract Expressionism current at the time - but archetypal manifestations of forces in Bourgeois' own unconscious that have been made concrete through the actions of the artist. In this sense they are truly primitive creations.
Fig. 1 Alberto Giacometti, Femme-Cuillère, 1926, bronze