Pregnant Woman

Signed with the artist’s initials, LB, lower right.

With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is truly one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. Best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations (like Spider [executed 1996/cast 1997, bronze with a silver nitrate patina, 440 x 670 x 520 cm, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; holding the record for most expensive sculpture by a woman, three times in a row, and sold for $32.1 million in 2019 at Christie’s] and Maman [1999, stainless steel, 927 x 891 x 1024 cm, Tate Modern, London]), inspired by her own memories and experiences, she was also a talented painter.

Early, and important, inspiration came from Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947) whom Bourgeois met in France as a teenager. Briony Fer writes (in Louise Bourgeois. Paintings, exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York & the New Orleans Museum of Art, 2022):

For Bourgeois, Bonnard always remained the artist who had found a painterly language to contain, embed, and even embalm the female body in a painting; he was the artist best able to paint what claustrophobia felt like and what a tantalizing glimpse of freedom might look like through an open window. […] It was not the subtle chromatic nuance of Bonnard’s painting that interested Bourgeois. While thematically one might say she was closer to the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose work she also admired, she saw in Bonnard how incarceration and claustrophobia could be portrayed in painting.

Apart from learning from the great Bonnard, Bourgeois also attended art classes in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, and the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. Bourgeois was also a student of Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955) with whom she studied in 1938, in his studio on the rue Blomet. In an interview, some thirty years later, with Colette Roberts in 1968, she remembered Léger as the one who persuaded her to be a sculptor and not a painter.

Bourgeois created well over one hundred paintings between 1938, when she arrived in New York City from France, and 1949, when she stopped painting and turned her attention more fully to creating three-dimensional work. Briony Fer, again, writes:

For the first ten years of her life as an artist, Louise Bourgeois was a painter. There is no doubt that this formative period of painting ultimately led her to sculpture: it defined her subjects and made her the sculptor that she would become once she gave up oil painting in 1949. Intensely personal, her pictures are a place where the artist created a self-mythology and her own intricate set of narratives.

Bourgeois’ move to the United States coincided with the major transatlantic struggle between Paris and New York as centers of modern art, in which her own development as an artist was inevitably caught up. As a woman artist, however, she was always at a disadvantage – as a mother with three young children (she had married American art historian Robert Goldwater [1907 -1973], in Paris, six weeks before relocating to New York), working below the radar and with constraints on her time to paint.

It has been said that the relationship between Bourgeois’ paintings and Surrealism “is hard to deny but harder to pin down”. As Briony Fer has pointed out Bourgeois was “if anything more atuned to the deadpan imagists like René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico – absolutely not to the Surrealists who would energize Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning”. It is worth pointing out, however, that some of her painterly work from the 1940s display similarities with Dorothea Tanning’s (1910 - 2012) work from the same decade.

The abstract, slightly biomorphic, creature (caught in what looks like one of Francis Bacon’s [1909 – 1992] famous “space frames” or “cages”) in It Is Six Fifteen (1946 – 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 61 cm, private collection) is strangely reminiscent to Bacon’s legendary Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, oil and pastel on fibreboard, each panel approx. 94 x 74 cm, Tate, London). Other early paintings by Bourgeois, like Hony soit qui mal y pense (1939, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 50.8 cm, private collection, Switzerland) also shows similarities with contemporary works by artist’s belonging to the so called School of London in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One can thus safely say that Bourgeois was never fully, or formally, affiliated with any specific artistic movement, but was, rather, a unique artist following her own path.

After a long and successful career as a sculptor, Bourgeois more and more returned to painting from the 1980s onwards. These works on paper often appear to be executed in seductive shades of red. Some works such as Untitled (1986, watercolour, ink, oil, charcoal and pencil on paper, 60.3 x 48.3 cm, Loise Bourgeois Trust) are, more or less, realistic while later works such as Les Fleurs (2009, gouache on paper, suite of six, 59.7 x 45.7 cm, private collection) leans more towards the abstract.

Pregnant Woman (of the same measurements as Les Fleurs) was also executed in 2009, just before Bourgeois passed away the following year. The work is related to several gouaches on paper (60 x 45 cm), executed in 2007 and 2008. In addition to technique and colour scale, these compositions are united by the titles (Couple, The Birth, Mother and The feeding) connecting them to the age-old circumstances surrounding the act of human reproduction. The suite has strong links to one of Bourgeois’ very last projects Do Not Abandon Me (a suite of 16 fabric prints executed, in collaboration with Tracey Emin [born 1963] and published by Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art, New York) from 2009/2010.

Tracey Emin remembered (in an article in The Standard, 31 January 2022, ahead of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at the Hayward Gallery, London) meeting Bourgeois at her home in New York “in about 2008”:

Her house was in Chelsea in New York, but my first encounter with her still wasn’t with her, but with her art: I went up the stairs and through the door, which opened really mysteriously. Louise had been doing a series of pink watercolours and they were all over the floor. Everything in the room was somehow monotone, everything was grey; grey and dusty - apart from these bright, cerise pink watercolors. It was so powerful. Louise was there, but she was wearing this big fawn cardigan and just blended in with the muted greys.

Provenance
Cheim & Read, New York.
Private collection, New York.
An important American private collection (acquired from the above).
Sotheby’s, London, Modern & Contemporary Day Auction, 7 March 2024, lot 314.
Firestorm (acquired at the above sale).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation