“The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex?”

—Louise Bourgeois

The composition of Together showcases the significance of spiral forms in Louise Bourgeois’ practice. Holding a deeply personal resonance, the spiral was, in Bourgeois’ words, a “study of the self.”ⁱ The deconstructed torsion metaphorically reflected at once her anguished psyche and her liberation from it: “The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them with three others or more to ring the water out. Later I would dream of getting rid of my father’s mistress. I would do it in my dreams by ringing her neck. The spiral – I love the spiral – represents control and freedom.”ⁱⁱ For Bourgeois, the reflexive solution to avoid spiraling out of control was to harness the spiral itself by creating it, as she wrote in a diary entry from 1986: “inward spiral tightens + tightens / Control of “attack of anxiety” / “through understanding the geneses of it.”ⁱⁱⁱ This duality of control and chaos is exemplified in the mirrored form of Together, with twin forms of a figure embedded in a spiral transposed across a horizontal axis like a reflection in a river. 

Each impression of Together has varying hand-coloring by the artist, making each a unique variant from the edition of twelve. Bourgeois and the publisher, Osiris, designated each impression in this edition as a study, perhaps in reference to the unique hand-additions. The imagery would be used later that same year in Bourgeois’ illustrated book Hang On, wherein each composition was accompanied by poetic text derived from notebooks and loose sheets Bourgeois wrote in the 1960s, along with spontaneous phrases written at the time of the book’s publication. For Hang On, the image of Together is combined with a verse that explores themes of loneliness and longing:

I want them to like

me and to tell me

that I am ok

I want to be noticed

I want to be given

I want to be loved

ⁱ Herkenhoff, “Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Temps,” in Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 1997, p. 273.
ⁱⁱ Paul Gardner, Louise Bourgeois, New York, 1994, p. 68.
ⁱⁱⁱ Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, December 23, 1986, quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Spiral, exh. cat., Cheim & Reid, New York, 2018, p. 56.