Untitled, plate 5 of 8, from the puritan

In 1990 Bourgeois published an illustrated book titled the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a new series of eight prints, all with hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is an enigmatic parable of lost love set in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of objective understanding: “With the puritan I analyzed an episode forty years after it happened. I could see things from a distance... I put it on a grid.” The text may have biographical implications; Bourgeois had referred to her friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, as a “puritan.”

Credit: Gift of the artist