LOUISE BOURGEOIS: COMPLETE BOOKS & PRINTS

Themes:

Nature

Techniques:

Photogravure

Description:

Photogravure

Support:

Smooth, wove paper

Dimensions:

plate: 11 × 7 1/2" (27.9 × 19.1 cm); sheet: 18 × 13 1/2" (45.7 × 34.3 cm)

Signature:

Not signed

Inscription:

Verso: "LB photogravure for homely girl - abandoned" lower center sheet, pencil, unknown hand.

Publisher:

unpublished

Printer:

Harlan & Weaver, New York

Edition:

2 known impressions of version 1

Impression:

Not numbered

Edition Information:

Proof before the editioning of version 2.

Background:

As explained in his published postscript to "Homely Girl, a Life," Peter Blum expressed to Bourgeois his wish to do a book at the time of their collaboration on the 1990 "Anatomy" portfolio. For a long time, he had also been interested in publishing a book by American playwright Arthur Miller. While looking with Bourgeois at the book "Portraits," a collection of photographs by Miller's wife Inge Morath, which included a portrait of Bourgeois, Blum had the idea of bringing author and artist together. The publisher proposed a collaborative project, which appealed to both.

Miller visited Bourgeois's sculpture-filled Brooklyn studio and saw there, among many other works, several pieces in her series Cells, which concerns the senses of sight, hearing, and smell. Miller selected for the project an unpublished text whose subject is a romance between a girl and a blind man.

Artist’s Remarks:

"There is a conversion here from the intense, precise study of nature ... toward something larger. Consider the arid and dangerous mountain range ... but with the sun showing up again. The darkness of the accident does not prevent the birth of a beautiful new day ... it is a kind of awakening, but on a more global level." (Quote cited in Wye, Deborah and Carol Smith. “The Prints of Louise Bourgeois.” New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 219.)

Former Cat. No.:

W & S 134

MoMA Credit Line:

Gift of the artist

MoMA Accession Number:

1269.2012

© The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY