LOUISE BOURGEOIS: COMPLETE BOOKS & PRINTS

Themes:

Body Parts, Faces & Portraits, Objects

Techniques:

Drypoint

Description:

Drypoint, with selective wiping

Support:

Smooth, wove paper

Dimensions:

plate: 9 3/8 x 7" (23.8 x 17.8 cm); page: 12 3/8 x 9 3/16" (31.4 x 23.4 cm)

Signature:

"LB 2000" lower right margin, pencil.

Publisher:

Daros Collection, Zürich

Printer:

Harlan & Weaver, New York

Edition:

100; plus 20 A.P., 1 P.P., bound as frontispiece; an unbound edition on paper of 7, plus 4 P.P., 1 H.C., and an edition of 5 on fabric

Impression:

"II/XX" lower left margin, pencil, unknown hand.

Edition Information:

There are 4 impressions of version 2, only state, outside the editions; 3 are variants, one (978.2008) is not.

State Changes and Additions:

Changes from version 1: composition re-drawn on a smaller plate, with slight variations overall.

Benefit Work:

For Daros Collection, Zürich

Background:

In 1994-95, Bourgeois, who was plagued by insomnia, created a series of 220 works on paper during sleepness nights. She kept them together as a group, calling them, "The Insomnia Drawings." The dealer and publisher Peter Blum mounted the first exhibition of this series during the Basel Art Fair in June 1995. Later, the Daros Collection of Zurich, Switzerland, purchased the series and decided to reproduce them in a two-volume book called, "Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings," which was published in 2000. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume is comprised of a foreward by Stephan Schmidheiny, texts by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Elisabeth Bronfen, a chronology, and a checklist, transcriptions, and notes.This two-volume work was published by Daros, Zurich, in collaboration with Peter Blum Edition, New York, and Scalo, Zurich, Berlin, New York.
For a special limited edition of this two-volume work, a drypoint entitled "Insomnia" was selected to serve as a bound-in frontispiece in the first volume. Since the selected drypoint was too large for this purpose, it was reworked in a second version, at a reduced size.

Curatorial Remarks:

Opposite the title page, the medium for this composition is given as "etching." This is a mistake. The medium is drypoint.

MoMA Credit Line:

Gift of the artist

MoMA Accession Number:

32.2002

This Work in Other Collections:

Tate Modern, London

© The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY