Softcover exhibition catalogue. 58 pages. 25.5 × 25.5 cm. Offset printed throughout. Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1982.
Published in 1982 by Robert Miller Gallery, Bourgeois Truth belongs to a decisive moment in the reception of Louise Bourgeois. Issued the same year as her Museum of Modern Art retrospective, the catalogue sits at the threshold between a long period of relative marginality and the institutional prominence that would follow. Drawings, sculpture, photographs, and critical writing appear together before the later consolidation of the Bourgeois canon.
The title is useful. Truth functions less as description than proposition. Bourgeois’ work repeatedly returned to memory, childhood, fear, desire, repair, and repetition—not as autobiography in a conventional sense but as material capable of being reworked into form. Robert Pincus-Witten’s essay places these concerns within the broader shift from post-minimal abstraction toward a more psychological and bodily language.
Today the catalogue operates differently. Its original task was to support an exhibition. The exhibition closed. The publication remained. What survives is a printed support from a specific New York art world: gallery, critic, artist, audience. A temporary vehicle that outlasted the event it announced.
The library stamp, softened edges, and damaged spine extend that history. Not defects so much as administrative traces. Marks left by storage, handling, accessioning, circulation, and retention.
Condition: Good. Sold as found. Slight spine damage, age toning, handling wear, library stamp to rear endpaper, soft corner wear. The catalogue remains structurally sound.
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