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Louise Bourgeois, Le Trani Episode, 1971, latex, 24" x 24" 17".

too small a door); houses with wings, or containing fires "against depression"; looming columns with circular eyes; a "coffin, for time that is gone." Anxiety is pervasive in these highly autobiographical works which reflect the artist's view of herself as a little girl - "trying to be good and absolutely disgusted with the world."
Another constant theme is the hermetic portrait. Bourgeois's first two sculpture show, in 1949 and 1950 at the Peridot Gallery, consisted of a series of painted black, white, and red wooden pole pieces brought together in an empty room as an environment of abstract personnages. The lovely stemlike figures stood in couples or alone, and observes remarked a painful sense of isolation. Each piece was pointed, "reluctant to touch anything, fearful of life itself." Their hooded, ghostlike quality, reminiscent of primitive ancestor totems, was indeed part of a private ritual by which Bourgeois could "summon all of the people I missed. I was not interested in details; I was interested in their physical presence. It was some kind of an encounter." She also had "a portable brother - a pole you could carry around"; the abstract portrait of one of her sons as a child is in the form of a free lying wooden knife - the bottom forked, the sharp top painted in a "window" pattern; upside down it resembles a horned Bambam mask.
In the 1960s, pieces with repeated leaf and tentacular shapes on one base, usually surrounding a single form colored or shaped differently, evolved into the "crowds" of breast-phallus protrusion, fingerlike growths, rounded cylinders with various vertical or horizontal emphasis. Sometimes these are flexible bunches, pushing up through the rough terrain, sometimes bullet shapes on flat platforms, sometimes sensuously shining domes covered by a Baroque drapery from which some emerge, beneath which others hide. These last are titled Cumulous, recalled earlier drawings of clustered hills and hill-breast-clouds. "if we are very very compulsive, all we have at our disposal is to repeat, and that expresses the validity of what we have to say. This is so important to me that all I can find is to repeat and repeat and repeat."
The "crowds," or multiplied standing forms, make up a good deal of the past few years' work. They are frequently groups of crisp geometric columns of marble with the tops sliced off at an angle to form a clean facet - found objects in Italy, where Bourgeois, undaunted by its traditional references, began to work in marble during the summer of 1968. Appropriately enough, these forms are the cores of containers, of

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