Tickets

Louise Bourgeois Untitled, plate 2 of 8, from the puritan 1990

  • Not on view

In 1990 Bourgeois published an illustrated book titled the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a new series of eight prints, all with hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is an enigmatic parable of lost love set in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of objective understanding: “With the puritan I analyzed an episode forty years after it happened. I could see things from a distance . . . I put it on a grid.” The text may have biographical implications; Bourgeois had referred to her friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, as a “puritan.”

Gallery label from 2013.
State/variant
Version 3 of 3, only state
Medium
Engraving, with hand additions
Dimensions
plate: 16 13/16 x 10 7/8" (42.7 x 27.7 cm); sheet (folded): 26 3/16 × 20 3/16" (66.5 × 51.2 cm)
Publisher
unpublished
Printer
Gravure, New York, Chestnut Street Press, Providence, RI, Renaissance Press, Ashuelot, NH, R.E. Townsend Studio, Georgetown, MA, Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, NH
Edition
2 known impressions of version 3, only state, outside the editions
Impresssion
Not numbered
Credit
Gift of the artist
Object number
486.1993.2
Copyright
© The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Department
Drawings and Prints
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].