Spring is just one of about eighty slender life-size sculptures that Louise Bourgeois calls Personages. "To the spectator they may not appear to be figures at all," explains the artist. "They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness." Trained as a painter in France, Bourgeois credits Fernand Léger, with whom she briefly studied, for helping her recognize her calling as a sculptor. She started carving her Personages out of wood after moving to the United States. She describes them as "people I missed. They were presences… they represented the people I had left behind - that is to say my father, my brother, and their family, my cousins, all the people I had left in France. I had come to this country alone. It was a kind of memorial." In 1949, seventeen Personages were exhibited as a group at the Peridot Gallery in New York where they formed an early site-specific installation. But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that Bourgeois enjoyed widespread recognition for her sculpture, emerging with a series of powerful, sexually explicit works evoking body parts that revealed her engagement with both Surrealist and feminist thought. O. S. Associate Curator, Painting & Sculpture