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B. 1911
MAISON

75 x 20 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. 190.4 x 52 x 24.1 cm.

steel and plaster

Executed in 1986.

PROVENANCE

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above on May 1986

EXHIBITED

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Louise Bourgeois, May - June 1986
Monterrey, Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Escultura de Louise Bourgeois: La Elegancia de la Ironía, June 1995, cat. no. 63, p. 77, illustrated

LITERATURE

Exh. Cat., Cincinnati, The Taft Museum, Louise Bourgeois, 1987, n.p., illustrated
Exh. Cat., St. Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum, Louise Bourgeois: The Personages, 1994, fig. 11, p. 33, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993, New York, 1994, p. 100, illustrated

NOTE

"Our house is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 4.

The complex psychological motivations behind the art of Louise Bourgeois have been the subject of many treatises focused primarily on the emotional stress of her childhood, fractured by her father's infidelity and strained by her mother's chronic illness and death. Stemming from this psychic history, Bourgeois' associations with the home are a constant in her repertoire and are provocatively revealed in the arresting Maison, 1986. A stoic and uncompromising geometric structure sustaining seven layers of anthropomorphic personages, Maison is a concise and powerful sculpture illustrating another page within her labyrinthine visual autobiography.

Arguably Bourgeois' personages -- beginning with her slender totemic sculptures of the late 1940s - are the most important in the artist's visual lexicon and they have been described as "achievements of American Postwar Sculpture," (Exh. Cat., St. Louis Art Museum, The Personages, 1994, p. 33). Bourgeois' integration of the personages motif into the present work creates a paradoxical nexus between the geometric and the anthropomorphic, identity and representation, similitude and difference. As noted by Robert Storr, Bouregeois' work is situated at the crux of Cubism and Surrealism as "the Cubist model stands for a sundered version of classical form with a basis in planar geometry, and the surrealist paradigm is that of topological shapes and spaces that may be subject to great distortion..."(Storr, et. al, Louise Bourgeois, London, 2003, p. 88). Maison is a marriage of these disparate ontologies, while the structure also engages with feminist concerns alluding to the "natural" and "repressed" associations of women and the home -- a subject Bourgeois initially addressed in her iconic Femme Maison paintings from the early 1940s.

Within Bourgeois' Maison, each personage is cast from the same mold and yet the repeated oscillation of the forms from left to right, suggest a tension and fundamental differentiation from within. A Freudian reading would suggest sexual connotations - a thematic concern throughout the artist's career - yet these anthropomorphic protrusions also suggest villi, the finger-like projections of the fetus through which nutrients are exchanged between the maternal and embryonic circulations. Each element strains upward in search of sustenance, and yet the gravity of their plaster bases thwarts their life-sustaining progression. The wheels at the base of the sturdy geometric structure thwart the notion of a secure foundation and the relationship between structure, shelter and home. The wheels further suggest an impermanence of location, thus making Bourgeois' Maison an unstable repository for its inhabitants rather than a protective sanctuary.