Louise Bourgeois
The Family
The Family
Price available upon request
2008
Gouache on paper; suite of 16
Each: 59.4 x 45.7 cm / 23 ⅜ x 18 in
Each: 67.3 x 53.7 x 4.4 cm / 26 ½ x 21 ⅛ x 1 ¾ in (framed)
An exquisite late work by Louise Bourgeois, ‘The Family’ (2008) presents many of the themes that defined the artist’s visual vocabulary throughout her life, including familial relationships, sexuality, the body, and death and the unconscious. Created in the twilight years of her life, this work is remarkable in its tender brutality as it reflects on the cycles of life: the polarities of birth and death, growth and decay, separation and togetherness.
A suite of sixteen vivid red works on paper, ‘The Family’ depicts moments of sexual intimacy. Unlike many idealized sensual portrayals of the subject, Bourgeois renders feelings of psychic pain such as anxiety, vulnerability, fear, jealousy and anger through a careful command of her medium. The imagery powerfully embodies a certain tension that starkly contrasts the coupling subjects.
‘There has always been sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapes—clusters of breasts like clouds—but I often merge the imagery—phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive. [...] We are all vulnerable in some way, and we are all male-female.’—Louise Bourgeois [1]
Graphic and raw, the fleshy pink and blood red paint is at once bodily and ethereal. Here, the paint is applied using a ‘wet-on-wet’ technique, which allows it to bleed and coalesce in a range of organic, accidental marks that complement the corporeal nature of the imagery. In a visceral way, Bourgeois’s watery marks illuminate the tenuous connections between family, abstractly morphing bodies and collapsing physical and psychological states to explore nuanced scenarios between the couple and the mother and child in her womb.
Bourgeois depicts the female form as a fertility symbol with a bulging womb and five pendulous breasts hanging from her neck. This imagery recalls some of Bourgeois’ most renowned sculptures, which powerfully address questions around gender, sexuality, and the human body, such as her ‘Cumul’ marbles from 1969. Furthermore, Bourgeois’s recurrent use of the number five symbolizes her two families—the family into which she was born and the family she had with her husband, Robert Goldwater.
Motherhood first appeared as a theme in Bourgeois’s practice around the time she gave birth to her son, Jean-Louis, in 1940. The subjects of maternity and familial unity persisted for some fifty years and were a critical part of the artist’s oeuvre. Bourgeois’s assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, has observed that her late gouaches like ‘The Family,’ which deal with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, are not about her experiences giving birth but are rather about her own birth and infancy, a return to her mother. [2]
‘As Bourgeois approached the end of her life, she looked back to the beginning, to her mother’s womb and breast, for the reassuring safety and security they represented. Even at this late date, the figure served as a probing vehicle for understanding, as it had in so many guises throughout Bourgeois’s career.’—Deborah Wye [3]
‘As Bourgeois approached the end of her life, she looked back to the beginning, to her mother’s womb and breast, for the reassuring safety and security they represented. Even at this late date, the figure served as a probing vehicle for understanding, as it had in so many guises throughout Bourgeois’s career.’—Deborah Wye [3]
A unique masterpiece, ‘The Family’ not only reflects the breadth of Bourgeois’s practice, but also reveals the depths of the artist’s unceasing examination of her emotions and the anguish, pride, pleasure and guilt of being both an artist and a mother.
About the artist
Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.