Totem

This approximately two-meter-high sculpture is a later bronze edition of the artist’s earliest mature three-dimensional work, i.e., her personages dating to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bourgeois’ personages grew out of a lexicon of visual motifs developed in the paintings and drawings produced after her arrival in New York in 1938. In the late 1940s, the artist increasingly rendered some of these motifs in sculptures made from balsa wood and painted in white or black. Bourgeois exhibited these original personages at the Peridot Gallery, New York in 1949 and 1950. Originally, the artist positioned these boldly vertical and anthropomorphic works in loose clusters across the gallery floor to evoke the sociability of a party or public square. The personages held a highly personal significance for Bourgeois. Many represent the artist, her family, and friends and were conceived as stand-ins for or "totems" of those that she had left behind in France.