Spotlight On: Louise Bourgeois

I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.

-          Louise Bourgeois[1]

Louise Bourgeois was one of the twentieth century’s most important artists, known for her expressive sculptural work, the forms of which are vessels of memory and trauma. In her eighty-year long practice Bourgeois’ work, although deeply personal, explored basic human themes: family, sexuality, suffering, life and mortality. Her material practice is characterized by multimedia experimentation and thus her work is eclectic, spanning painting, printmaking, textiles, writing, sculpture, performance and installation, however, united by a fierce and unwavering conceptual undercurrent of personal narratives and art as means of emotional release.

Although she was associated with the Abstract Expressionists and elements of her practice draw on Surrealist and Dadaist ideas, Bourgeois’ work is individual, and she was not formally part of any movement. She also saw her explorations of sexuality and gender as dealing with universal emotions, things that are “pre-gender”.[2] Bourgeois remains one of the most successful female artists of her time and she was the first woman to receive a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, at the age of 71.

Figure 1.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 where her parents ran a gallery, though they soon moved to live in the southern French suburb of Choisy-le-Roi where a young Bourgeois assisted in the family workshop for the restoration of the medieval and renaissance tapestries. At 27 she moved to New York City after marrying American art historian Robert Goldwater and she lived there until her death in 2010.[3]

Her career began after the death of her mother in 1932 with paintings and drawings until the 1960s when she began experimenting with solid materials like wood, plaster, latex and eventually bronze. This movement into sculpture was one that she devoted herself to, describing the physicality of three-dimensional form as more tangible and thus more vivid means of expression.[4]

The catalyst for Bourgeois’ work and a theme she explored her whole life was that of her family and her vivid memories of childhood. She often references her fractious relationship with her father, Louis, for whom she was merely another daughter, not the son he hoped for, and who was repeatedly, deeply unfaithful to her mother, Joséphine Fauriaux. Art was catharsis, a way to make tangible the deep anxieties Bourgeois carried and to call them violently, tenderly into being.

Figure 2.

Among Bourgeois’ most recognised work is the 9-metre-tall bronze spider, her Maman.  Like most of her late-career work, the work is an homage to her mother. Appearing in the 1990’s the spiders recall her mother as a maker; a weaver of silk and a giver of life – just like Bourgeois herself through her artmaking practice. The spider is both safe and scary, delicate and strong. Standing on spindly legs, much like one of Le Corbusier’s houses on stilts, Maman is towering but also precarious – a protector and a guardian who, even as a child, Bourgeois understood as vulnerable.

The progression through to this late work can be seen emerging even in her very first solo sculpture show, in 1949, when Bourgeois exhibited two rooms full of slim, spindly, pole-like figures of bronze and wood which she called her Personages. These works speak of the individual and the group – the artist alone in her new American world, the child alone in the family. One work, The Blind Leading the Blind (1957-9) depicts a row of pointy legs attached to a beam like a table from under which a little child could watch the adults.[5]

Figure 3.

Another of her famous works, Filette (1968), meaning little girl, takes the child into uncomfortable proximity to that adult world. Made of latex over plaster, Filette is a tactile shape that can be read as either phallus or female torso.  Contrasting in an uncomfortable fashion with the title, Filette, the works contains hints at the complicit knowledge of adult sexuality in the form of her father’s affair. The work explores the soft/hard binary, a reoccurring theme in the artist’s work: it is at once physical, hard and embodied as well as soft and fleshy.

Figure 4.

This work was further immortalised by Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1982 portrait of the artist in which she carries it casually under her arm like a handbag or a baguette. Bourgeois recalls that Mapplethorpe’s work was about men so when he asked to photograph her, she brought her Filette. Although Bourgeois also said that ‘From a sexual point of view, I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate’. [6]

Later in 1974, after the death of her husband, Bourgeois created a masterpiece of this soft sculptural style, her first enclosed environment, The Destruction of the Father. The soft growths of her previous works were shown encased and aglow to be viewed through a vitrine like a stage set, memory incarnate, as the viewer relives Bourgeois’ childhood fantasy of destroying her taunting father at the supper table.

From 1989, in her eighties, Bourgeois continued to explore confinement in a series of installations called Cells. A single unit, a prison, a basic element of the body; these Cells contain the fear of being trapped and of dissolving highlighting the barrier between the interior world of the artist and the exterior world of the exhibition space.[7]

Figure 5.

Corporeal and violent, Bourgeois’ artistic mission to manifest and transform the darkness of her life presents itself stridently in all her work. Making art was ultimately for Bourgeois the only means to keep on living.

Article researched and written by: Amy Thomson de Zylva BA (Hons)

Figure 6.

Learn More:

There is so much more to learn of Louise Bourgeois and her wonderful, often disturbing, highly skilled practice.

Watch Bourgeois speak of her father as she peels a tangerine here.

Watch her friend and assistant of over 30 years Jerry Gorovoy and Tate Modern director Frances Morris discuss her career here.

Read this interview between Bourgeois and critic Paulo Herkenhoff.

Learn about her 1978 installation Confrontation here.

Watch her explain two sculptures in relation to feminist theory with SFMOMA.

Image captions:

Figure 1: Photograph of Louise Bourgeois courtesy of WikiArt.

Figure 2: Maman (1999), courtesy WikiArt.

Figure 3: The Blind Leading the Blind (1949) courtesy WikiArt.

Figure 4: Filette (1968) courtesy WikiArt.

Figure 5: Destruction of the Father (1974) courtesy WikiArt.

Figure 6: Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) (1993) courtesy WikiArt.

Footnotes:

1. Tate. “The Art of Louise Bourgeois – Look Closer.” Tate. Accessed May 2021.

2. SFMOMA. “Louise Bourgeois’s Work Isn’t Always Feminist · SFMOMA.” Accessed May 2021.

3. The Guardian. “Louise Bourgeois Obituary,” May 31, 2010.

4. The Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois | HOW TO SEE the Artist with MoMA Chief Curator Emerita Deborah Wye, 2017.

5. The Art Story. “Louise Bourgeois.” Accessed May 2021.

6. The Museum of Modern Art. “Louise Bourgeois. Fillette. 1968 | MoMA.” Accessed May 2021.

7. The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. “Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence; The Cells.” Accessed May 2021.