Louise Bourgeois France, 1911-2010

Untitled (1960) represents a relatively early moment in Louise Bourgeois’ sculpting career, before the artist began to achieve international recognition in the 1980s. The work succeeds her first major body of sculptural oeuvre from the 1940s and 1950s, the Personages, which consist of highly abstract, totemic, upright and slender forms, often put together in groups, which depict individuals and Bourgeois’ relationship with them.

As she moved into the 1960s, Bourgeois began to shift out of such formal abstraction, by creating abstracted figurative works in plaster and clay reminiscent of ancient votive figurines. In a statement from the period, Bourgeois describes the stylistic development of her work as a ‘change from rigidity to pliability’.

The themes in Bourgeois’ work throughout her career remained highly personal, including her parents and childhood in France, her domestic confinement and transcendence, her focus on gender and the female experience, her interest in a French tradition of hysteria and creativity. However, her representation of these themes naturally developed as her work progressed. In the 1960s these body forms and body parts in her sculptures became more organic, and very different from the Personages in both shape and the materials she used. She began to use materials such as latex, plaster, and occasionally marble and bronze. By the late 1960s, Bourgeois reached, what she described as her ‘erotic period’, creating sculptures that powerfully address questions around gender, sexuality, and the human body, many of which depict penises or breasts, or the merging of the two. In sculptures such as these, Bourgeois used fragmented body parts to investigate complex emotional states. They appear regularly in Bourgeois’ work and are often referred to as ‘part-objects’. The term ‘part-object’ was first used by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her writings on the development of young children. In Klein’s view, the first ‘part-object’ we encounter in life is our mother’s breast. This idea of the ‘part-object’ has since often been used to describe sculptures by modern and contemporary artists that take the form of body parts in exploring sexuality, desire or questions of gender.

Untitled (1960), along with a handful of important works of the period – including the amorphous Amoeba, nest-like Fée Couturière and Labyrinthine Tower- belongs to an important, small series of innovative sculptures from a significant transitional moment in Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre, as she moved out of abstraction, into the erotic. This work’s substantial corporeal presence is simultaneously ambiguous and emotionally charged, abstracted and figurative, male and female, maternal yet vulnerable. Prefiguring the ‘part-objects’, Untitled, presents a collusion of bodily and psychological opposites, whilst also inviting a dialogue with the canonical forms of Modernist sculpture.

Untitled (1960) wasn’t cast until 2004, due to the unaffordability of Bronze for the artist, many of her early sculptures were cast later, after she achieved curatorial and commercial recognition. Bourgeois’ market did not begin to develop until the 1980s, after her first retrospective at MoMA in 1982, this key moment enabled her to start producing some of the large bronzes for which she is so well-known today.