NEW YORK, NY.- A rare portfolio of nine engravings by Louise Bourgeois has sold at
Swann Auction Galleries in New York for $413,000.
One of only 19 known copies of He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, with accompanying text, written in the form of parables, was printed at the world-renowned Atelier 17 in New York.
The work was completed in 1947, two years after Bourgeois’ first solo show, and crosses the narrow divide between Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism, echoing themes that occupied the artist for much of her life: childhood trauma, hidden emotion, loneliness, fear, anger, sexuality and fragility.
It dates towards the end of a period in the 1930s and ’40s when Bourgeois focused on printmaking, a medium she would then abandon until much later in her life. Following its completion she turned her attention to wood totems that recall some of the imagery here.
Inspired by the skyscrapers that impressed her when she arrived in New York from Paris in 1938, she creates stark, figure-like constructions set in plain landscapes, with two very different illustrations, one of ladders in an interior, the other what appears to be a surreal roofscape.
Inspired by the transition from her life in Paris to New York, the work reflects her initial isolation, having left behind her friends.
Other top prices from the November 15 auction include $125,000 for Untitled (Sidrach, Misach and Abednego), a mixed media panel from 1962 by Alfonso Ossorio, $106,250 for Untitled, a 1966 gouache and ink work by Alexander Calder, and $104,000 for William Copley’s 1958 oil on canvas, Lolapulco.
