Louise Bourgeois
The Puritan, 1990
llustrated book pages, bound, 32 pages,
8 hand-painted etchings on paper and texts by the artist
60 × 52.8 × 5 cm
Signature: Signed
Edition: 45/75
Estimate: |
CHF 20,000 - CHF 30,000
|
Sold for:
|
CHF 62,000 |
Bidding ended. Lot has been sold.
Provenance: Donated by Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz Paris Köln |
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Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) grew up near Paris.
After studying mathematics, Bourgeois attended
art schools in Paris. In 1938 she married the New
York art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to
New York, where she raised three sons with him.
Bourgeois initially focused on painting and print-
making, only turning her attention to sculpture in
the late 1940s. Writing, which she pursued almost
obsessively, and drawing thereby always remained
key forms of expression for the artist.
In 1990 Louise Bourgeois published an illustrated
book titled The Puritan, in which she paired a text
she had written in 1947 with a series of eight new,
hand-coloured engravings. The text is an enigmatic parable about a lost love, set in New York City.
Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the
images as a tool of objective understanding: “With
The Puritan, I analysed an episode forty years after
it happened. I could see things from a distance
[...] I put it on a grid.” The text may have biographical implications; Bourgeois had referred to her
friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of
the Museum of Modern Art, as a “puritan”.
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