To fully understand the personal nature of Louise Bourgeois’s extensive practice, it is important to study not only the artist’s famous large-scale bronze and steel sculptures, but also her mastery of mediums beyond the three-dimensional, specifically in drawing. Executed in 1951, Untitled is an exquisite example of Bourgeois’s draughtsmanship, which was recently the subject of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait in 2017-2018. If Bourgeois’s sculptures went largely unnoticed until the late 1970s, her drawings were even more clandestine in nature, neither published nor exhibited until a full ten years later. Untitled was included in two of the seminal exhibitions that defined the scope and significance of Bourgeois’ drawings, namely the exhibition Louise Bourgeois, which traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago between 1982 and 1984, as well as Louise Bourgeois: Works on Paper 1939-1988 at the Museum Overholland, Amsterdam, in 1988.

Bourgeois’s early drawings from the 1940s and 1950s were largely based on memories from her childhood. Born in Paris to parents who restored Renaissance tapestries, she was fascinated by the surrounding draped fabrics adorned with plant and floral designs. These feather-like motifs are evident in Untitled, meditatively drawn in hatched lines, varying in density, which in turn create the illusion of light and shadow. As the artist herself stated, “everything is fleeting, but your drawing will serve as a reminder; otherwise it is forgotten” (Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations, exh. cat., University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1995, p. 21).