Louise Bourgeois

Robert Miller Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
PaineWebber Group Inc., New York (acquired from the above in February 1988)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Akron Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective, November 1982 - January 1984
New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1939-1987, January 1988, p. 101, illustrated
Paris, Musée National d'art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; Helsinki City Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: Pensées-plumes, February - July 1995, p. 62, illustrated
Houston, Museum of Fine Arts; The Detroit Institute of Art; Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Diego Museum of Art; Miami Center for the Arts, Art Works: The PaineWebber Collection of Contemporary Masters, July 1995 - June 1997
Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, El Impulso Figurativo: Obras de la Colección de Arte UBS, September 2005 - January 2006

Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Bourgeois Truth, 1982, n.p., illustrated 

This work is in good condition overall. There is evidence of wear and handling to the sheet along with artist's pinholes along the edges. There are a few small repaired tears along the extreme edges. In addition, there is a 2 inch vertical linear area of pinpoint brown accretions located to the right of the right object, lightly visible in the catalgue illustration. Hinged verso to the matte intermittenly around the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois' long and successful career was notable for many reasons, not the least of which was her well-known anger at her father's infidelity that served as the fuel driving the production of her tremendous body of work. As Bourgeois described, her creative process was a method of exercising demons and believed "physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect." While she rejected the label "feminist," Bourgeois' work would serve as a guiding light to numerous female artists that followed her and who wore the label more comfortably.

Widely known for her sculptural works and her wide-ranging choice of materials, the first decade of her career was spent primarily creating works on paper. From 1945 to 1947, shortly after arriving in the United States, she produced a series of drawings, Femmes-Maisons (House-Women), which were heavily influenced by the Surrealist movement and depicted nude female figures with homes instead of heads. These powerful and tragic, Surrealist infused images concerned with issues of female domesticity, represented the first steps in a career that would make her one of the most important artists of the 20^th Century.

By 1949, Bourgeois was fully versed in the language of Surrealism and adopted a more assertive position by subverting its strategy in Untitled. In this present work, Bourgeois depicted the Surrealist concept l'œil et le sexe, a combination of an eye and genitals. The twisting tendrils of hair in Untitled reveal two vaginal openings, the uppermost containing an eye that gazes at a phallic figure that is a direct precursor to one of her most famous sculptures, La Fillette (1968). In Bourgeois' configuration, the female l'œil-sexe icon confronts the receding and passive phallic object, thereby reversing Surrealism's female-as-observed object relationship seen in works such as Salvador Dali's 1933 photomontage, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy. The phallocentric gaze is replaced by a dominant female form that unsettles the male object. Bourgeois would return and refine this concept in her 1966 sculpture, Le Regard (The Gaze), where the l'œil-sexe object materializes as an ocular orb made of latex and cloth. Untitled represents one of the earliest examples of Bourgeois' mature handling of a theme that would remain at the heart of her work for the rest of her career.