First published on 4 June 2018
Louise Bourgeois, The Three Graces, 1947
‘Art was for Louise a system of self-knowledge ... of discharging tensions and anxieties, of exorcising early traumas.’
Philip Larratt-Smith discusses Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture The Three Graces (1947), included in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel. A poignant example from the artist’s seminal series of iconic works entitled Personage created between 1945 and 1955, these totemic forms were intended to serve as both physical and emotional ‘surrogates’ for the family and the home that the emigre artist had left behind in occupied France.
Philip Larratt-Smith is a writer and curator based in New York, and was Bourgeois’s literary archivist from 2002–2010. Larratt-Smith is currently working on a publication of the psychoanalytical writings of Louise Bourgeois to be published by Princeton University Press in 2020.