He disappeared into complete silence signs Bourgeois’s independence and personal growth; it reflects her distancing from painting and it marks her own independent stylistic identity in the post war milieu. Consisting of nine parables and nine engravings, this work creates a universe where eternal loneliness meets absurdity and miscommunications, but never resignation. The booklet starts with a parable in which a woman is waiting in silence and ends with the image of New York flooded by the Hudson river. The engravings are inhabited by isolated geometrical and anthropomorphical constructions, whereas the parables’ characters are on a perilous threshold, yet are never excluded from life. Together they articulate witty tragedies from everyday life, in what can be called a fragile metaphysics of the human condition. (English and French Edition)