Louise Bourgeois

This exquisite artist’s book is the fruit of a collaboration between the American writer and playwright Arthur Miller and the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, both of whom were nearly 80 years old at the time of its creation. Gallerist Peter Blum initiated the project and published the book in a limited edition of just 100 copies, of which a number are today housed in major international museums and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

In his novella Homely Girl, A Life, Miller tells the story of Janice Sessions, who suffers from severe inferiority complexes because she considers her face unattractive. Following her separation from her husband, she begins a relationship with a blind musician. This experience not only leads to her physical and sexual liberation, but also frees her from her obsessive fixation on her looks. Miller later adapted the novella into a screenplay, which the Israeli director Amos Gitai made into a film under the title Eden (2001).

In her artistic engagement with Miller’s text, Bourgeois concentrated on two central motifs. In a series of ten drypoint etchings of floral and botanical forms, she took up the theme of beauty and the associated notions of femininity. In parallel, she created haunting photomontages of diseased human eyes, conferring upon the work a disturbing alternative world. Bourgeois had already explored the themes of sight, blindness and voyeurism at an early date in The Blind Leading the Blind (1949). The motif of the eye – often in the form of pairs of eyes – occupies a foreground position in her late work, too.

Homely Girl, A Life (bound book with text by Arthur Miller)

Bound book in two volumes (Volume I and II) with 10 drypoint etchings, 8 photolithographs and 1 photograph, on various papers

29.7 x 22.5 cm

Edition: 37/100

Signature: Volume I signed on the flyleaf. 

Arthur Miller Louise Bourgeois

Provenance: donated by Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz Paris Köln