“Personages” are the first pieces
for which Bourgeois became known, and
the earliest body of work explored in
“Revolution in the Making.” Some of them
specifically reference totems, Oceanic
art, and the human body, while others, like
Untitled (The Wedges), 1950, visibly
build on a formal history using wood and
stacking forms in ways that characterize
some of the most advanced works of
Constantin Brancusi. Bourgeois had
a unique background. She both looked
at the history of modernism from the
vantage point of mid 20th-century
France and understood the more univer-
sal forms that come out of Oceanic
and primitive art. Her husband, Robert
Goldwater, was a leading scholar of
African art and the first director of the
Museum of Primitive Art in New York.
—PAUL SCHIMMELAsawa created one of the earliest
examples of wirework in our show. Some
people say her work is crocheted,
but it’s not quite crochet—she looped the
wire to build a textile-like construction.
This piece, Untitled (S.304), 1967,
is a five-lobed hanging structure made
of handwoven brass wire and is the
largest sculpture she ever made. It is an
exploration of a continuous line that
forms a complex lattice, ultimately
resulting in this very flexible grid that
softens the hard geometries of modernist
sculpture. Asawa comes out of a much
more interdisciplinary background than
many of the artists in “Revolution in
the Making.” She attended Black Mountain
College, where she worked closely
with Josef and Anni Albers; she also
studied with Merce Cunningham and was
familiar with his groundbreaking work
in dance. She saw herself as an artist in the
round, rather than just a sculptor; a
whole artist capable of working in a
multiplicity of media. —JENNI SORKINLOUISE
BOURGEOIS
RUTH
ASAWA
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