Room Guide - Room 3

The carved, monolithic forms of Bourgeois’s Personage sculptures slowly became more articulated (like vertebrae) and abstract; they now consisted mostly of stacked columns of wood and plaster. Bourgeois first showed the Personages in a series of exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in New York from 1949 to 1953. The works originally had no bases; they were displayed directly on the floor, creating an environment that viewers could enter and walk through.

The Personages series shows a connection to the work of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whom Bourgeois had met in 1950. They have also been seen as pre-empting the modular sculpture produced by minimalist artists during the 1960s. But unlike Brancusi’s rigidly symmetrical towers, or the hard-edged geometry of minimalist sculptures, Bourgeois’s structures are almost always skewed and off-balance, giving them a fragile, vulnerable quality.

Fallen Woman (Femme Maison)
1946–7
Oil on linen
Private collection

‘Fallen women’ - women discovered to have had sex outside marriage - often appear in moralising Victorian art. Here, Bourgeois’s woman has ‘fallen’ literally as well as metaphorically: she seems to have crashed head-first onto the ground.

Bourgeois herself had a fear of falling, in both literal and metaphorical senses. But here the word seems to have further connotations: ‘Fallen … means that she is not up to what was expected of her.’ (Louise Bourgeois)

Untitled
1946–7
Oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, purchased with support
from the Rembrandt Society, partial thanks to the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds

Untitled
1950
Painted wood and stainless steel
Daros Collection, Switzerland

Untitled
1950
Painted wood and stainless steel
Collection of Ginny Williams, courtesy Ginny Williams Family Foundation, Denver

Mortise
1950
Painted wood and stainless steel
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of the Collectors Committee

This is one of the later works in Bourgeois’s Personage series. The earlier sculptures were monolithic, frontal, and carved out of single beams of wood. Originally, they didn’t have bases and had to be nailed to the floor to stand up.

From the 1950s Bourgeois began instead to use repetition as a means of building more stable sculptures. Pieces of wood were stacked on top of one another, joined by a central steel stalk, or carpentry joints, as here. These more abstract works seem to refer less to the human world.

Untitled
1950
Painted wood and stainless steel
Collection Jerry Gorovoy

Spiral Woman
1951–2
Painted wood and stainless steel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist (by exchange), 2001

Femme Volage
1951
Painted wood and stainless steel
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York

The title Femme Volage - ‘Fickle Woman’ – refers to a woman who sways one way and then the other in her relationships with men.

Unlike the earlier Personages carved from single beams of wood, this is a complex, multi-part structure. Myriad shards of painted wood are threaded onto a narrow rod that looks like a needle or a spindle. Bourgeois associates both with the resourceful creativity of her mother’s work in the family’s tapestry repair business; they seem to have a sort of talismanic power to heal and restore.

Memling Dawn
1951
Painted wood and stainless steel
Private collection, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

This human-scale sculpture is named after the early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It is made from separate black hardwood squares piled on top of each other and held together by a central rod. Around this rod the moveable squares are positioned slightly askew, as if the piece is on the alert, ready to protect itself from all sides.

Bourgeois has described the separate sections of this work as functioning as antennae, as if the piece has internal ‘radar’ which makes it sensitive to its surroundings.

Red Fragmented Figure
1953
Painted wood and stainless steel
Collection Ursula Hauser, Switzerland

Figure
1954
Painted wood and stainless steel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist (by exchange), 2001

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Louise Bourgeois with Spider IV in 1996. Photo: Peter Bellamy