LOUISE BOURGEOIS: COMPLETE BOOKS & PRINTS

Themes:

Body Parts, Fabric Works, Faces & Portraits, Objects

Techniques:

Drypoint

Description:

Drypoint, with selective wiping, and red ink additions

Support:

Fabric

Dimensions:

plate: 9 3/8 x 6 15/16" (23.8 x 17.6 cm); sheet: 15 3/8 x 14 9/16" (39 x 37 cm)

Signature:

"LB" right lower margin, stitched in red thread.

Publisher:

Harlan & Weaver, New York

Printer:

Harlan & Weaver, New York

Edition:

5 on fabric; and an edition of 100, plus 20 A.P., 1 P.P., bound as the frontispiece for the illustrated book, "Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings," and an unbound edition on paper of 7 A.P., plus 4 P.P., 1 H.C.

Impression:

Not numbered

Edition Information:

There are variations in the fabrics used in this edition, as is commonly found in the old fabrics Bourgeois chose to use as printing surfaces. Some impressions have staining and scorching.

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

State Changes and Additions:

Changes from version 2, state I, in aquatint: halo effect around head, mostly obscured by wiping.

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.

MoMA Credit Line:

Gift of the artist and Harlan & Weaver, Inc.

MoMA Accession Number:

1454.2001

This Work in Other Collections:

Tate Modern, London

© The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY