Although Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre spans her entire adult life, it wasn’t until she reached her seventies that the artist and sculptor hit her creative peak. Since then, Bourgeois has produced an amalgam of sculptural pieces, assembled from a variety of materials, that reveal not only her family’s past but also her distinct and disturbing vision of sexuality.
Over the past 30 years, Bourgeois has been the subject of many retrospectives, including a recent exhibition at the Tate Modern, Centre Pomipidou, at the Guggenheim in New York, and is now featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibit’s catalog, “Louise Bourgeois,” edited by Frances Morris, includes an overview of the artist’s career as well as essays by esteemed scholars Julia Kristeva and Robert Storr.
Since moving to New York with her husband Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois has increasingly focused on revisiting her French youth through her art. Her family life serves as the principal subject of her personal writings: an intent she notably declares in the title of her collection of writing and interviews, “Destruction of the Father/ Reconstruction of the Father” (published by MIT Press). Almost every art historian who has written on Bourgeois notes the emphasis the artist places on her early psychological development as a creative tool. She denies the influence of primitive art forms on her work (her husband was the sole curator of New York’s former Museum of Primitive Art, whose collection was transferred to the Met), though a series of totem poles done early in her career would seem to reject this claim. However, she undoubtedly foregrounds her parents. Bourgeois’ mother restored tapestries while her father, a landscape architect, carried on a decade-long affair with her English tutor Sadie. Despite the distaste many scholars have for ascribing artistic intent to biography, Bourgeois’ insistence upon such an act is apparent within her work, with many of her most recent forms blurring the clarity that exists between past and present, art and restored object.
The ambiguity of Bourgeois’ art—its matted, worn and unraveling forms announcing both an anti-narrative formalism and a calculated sense of sexual deviance from which pleasure is partially stripped from an object in order to apply pain and anxiety—dissolved throughout the 1980s as she moved towards installation art. Though not all of these later pieces have the same amount of power, the viewer does feel as though Bourgeois has unfolded her interior life for the sake of emotional honesty with her audience. Moreover, their representational power is striking.
Bourgeois’ famous spiders, which have dominated the public reception of her art, are certainly not her best work. They are at once eerie and overwrought, not tapping into the pathos that Bourgeois employs in the more effective “Couple IV” (1997) in which two black, headless rag dolls make love within a glass cabinet. The stubs of their heads are perhaps just their necks, and the bottom figure’s prosthetic leg oozes melancholy. Her “cell” series function as a sort of micro-architecture, revealing aged objects through slits in rectilinear wood panels. The viewer feels the vulnerability of confinement suggested by this space through the penetration of an exterior gaze into these enclosed spaces. In contrast to the ambiguity of Bourgeois’ earlier phallic forms, which could double as clitoral, these spaces rely upon the potency of paradox, simultaneously concealing and revealing.
In 1982, Bourgeois was the first female artist to have a retrospective at MOMA. Her art is esteemed not only because of its rigor and abundance, but also for its deviant evolution. The current exhibit seems to be of the opinion that, like the Romantics, Bourgeois has constructed an artistic identity based upon a recollection of memory, a personal need rather than a public want. The retrospective’s catalog speaks to this purpose, alphabetically chronicling the life, work and influences that crafted Bourgeois into the soothsayer that she has become. Modernism was the mode she took yet her denial of their values leads one to wonder why the catalog spends so much time on figures such as Le Corbusier and Freud. Indeed, Bourgeois’ life presents itself with the richness of a
Bildungsroman, and this catalog wants to treat the art as well as its creator with due reverence.
Unfortunately, the catalog does a poor job of tracking her artistic evolution. It also fails to investigate the interesting topic of how Bourgeois became such a pervasive presence in the art world in spite of her gender. Furthermore, her concurrent distance and proximity to that world reveals an often ignored path of development in which influence is nonetheless attained. Echoes of Giacometti may be found in her work, while her effect on artists like Joseph Beuys and Bruce Naumann is unmistakable. The zoning of her own artistic landscape has, however, likely afforded Bourgeois the distinction with which she is now met. Her personal writings (excerpted throughout the catalog) identify her art as part of her personal removal from artistic trends. Bourgeois desires that her art should possess its own space, removed rather than juxtaposed with other objects. The exhibition at the Guggenheim emphasized this want, lending each form an austere white space for its thematic and formal contents to seep into and corrupt.
Ultimately, it is not the art itself that draws viewers to Bourgeois’ vision. Her sculpture has often been tepidly received, but she has kept the public’s attention with her liberated sense of experimentation. The limitations of her semiotic system begin to weigh upon the viewer when faced with so many of her pieices, yet it seems irrelevant insomuch as the viewer also experiences a kind of psychotherapeutic catharsis as a result of her work. Her vision of beauty is full-bodied and obscured, moving in and out of many different spatial types without feeling hollow or absent.
Friday, September 19, 2025
Book Review: “Louise Bourgeois,” edited by Frances Morris
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Reading Time: 4 minutes
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