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Spoon Woman painted wood 741/2 x 12 x 12 in. (189.2 x 30.4 x 30.4 cm.) Executed in 1949-1950. PROVENANCE Robert Miller Gallery, New York Frances and Thomas Dittmer, Lake Forest LITERATURE S. Page and B. Parent, Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, environments, dessins 1938-1995, Paris, 1995, p. 72 (illustrated, titled Depression Woman ) EXHIBITION New York, Peridot Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, Recent Work 1947-1949: Seventeen Standing Figures in Wood, October 1949 New York, Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, Sculpture 1941-1953, Plus One New Piece, September 1979 New York, Museum of Modern Art; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Akron Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective, November 1982-January 1984, p. 58, pl. 53 (illustrated in color) New York, Sperone Westwater Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Works from the 50's, April-May 1989 NOTES This work has been re-titled by the artist as Depression Woman in 1994. Spoon-Woman is one of a celebrated group of wooden "figure" sculptures with which Louise Bourgeois made her sculptural debut at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949 between 1950. Her ground-breaking show at the Peridot Gallery caused a sensation and established her as one of the most important sculptors of her generation. As she recalled, "Pierre Matisse and Duchamp came by and said, "This is extraordinary!" I told them it was simply a manifestation of "homesickness". They looked at each other and understood, that's all there was to it but, there is a great intensity and very great personal emotion. This is apparent in the constant repetition of the word 'figure' which expresses the fact that I had left my entire family in Europe. At bottom, I wasn't ashamed, but I was sick at having abandoned them because I was the only one to leave. I married an American student and left along with him. Thus my entire family remained in France and the homesickness was doubled by a sense of abandonment. I felt I had abandoned them," (cited in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, London, 2000, p. 177) All executed on a human scale, Bourgeois' strange, haunting 'figures' are physical materialisations of unspecific personal emotions related to individual members of her family. They are not modern totems - as they were first understood to be in the all-pervasive and distinctly "heroic" climate of Abstract Expressionism current at the time - but archetypal manifestations of forces in Bourgeois' own unconscious that have been made concrete through the actions of the artist. In this sense they are truly primitive creations. Fig. 1 Alberto Giacometti, Femme-CuillŠre, 1926, bronze.