Louise Bourgeois with Jambes Enlacées 1990 in her studio in Brooklyn, New York, 1991, photographed by Inge Morath
© Inge Morath / Magnum Photos. Artwork © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021
A photograph of Louise Bourgeois (1911– 2010) shows the artist perched on a block of marble that looks as if it could have been split from the rock that supports the famous lovers in Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss 1901–4. But in place of the monumental backs, hands and feet of the embracing pair, here lie two fragile, crossed legs.
Bourgeois was born in Paris six years before the death of fellow French sculptor Rodin, and the pair’s history is unexpectedly entwined. In her mid-twenties Bourgeois studied under Charles Despiau, Rodin’s former assistant. During that time she might have learnt about the latter’s fondness for making sculptures of body parts, particularly hands, a motif that she would turn to later in her life.
‘You have to win the shape’, Bourgeois said of the process of sculpting in marble, and like Rodin, she often preserved marks of the process, such as on the rough-hewn base of Jambes Enlacées 1990, pictured here.
Auguste Rodin’s watercolour and pencil drawing of a woman, acquired by Louise Bourgeois some time before 1939
Private collection, courtesy The Easton Foundation
The pair’s work was shown together in various group exhibitions from the 1960s onwards, including The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture: from Rodin to 1969 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Bourgeois even owned one of Rodin’s watercolours – a fluid sketch of a standing, twisting nude, its washiness evocative of some of her final figurative gouaches.
ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois in Focus, Tate Liverpool, 24 July 2021 – 16 January 2022.
