When we think of 20th-century women sculptors who have reached world fame, not many stand shoulder to shoulder with a Constantin Brâncusi, Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore. But there is one, Louise Bourgeois, a petite, bony, eccentric française with an ambition and artistic vision that have raised her to equal stature.
After leaving France as a young woman in 1938 to live in New York, Bourgeois’ surrealist painting evolved into sculpture-making. Married to an American historian, the
young mother gathered objects and materials from the streets of New York and set up totem-like sculptures on the roof of her apartment.
She was driven to find artistic self-expression and soon found herself at the forefront of abstract, conceptual and installation art, involved in a dialogue of ideas with artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. Now 97 years old, this remarkable and often controversial artist is becoming more influential and “contemporary” with each passing year.
“Art,” the sculptor with the weathered face says, “is a rare alphabet that very few can understand. I have to be true to my emotions. In my work, I do what I have to do. I don’t think in terms of an audience.” Yet she continues to produce her uncompromising work—and the art world responds.
There is hardly a moment nowadays when a sculpture or installation or drawing by Louise Bourgeois isn’t being shown somewhere in the world. A well-conceived retrospective of her work took place last year in London, Paris and New York. Bourgeois has even entered the pop culture awareness of mainstream America with her trademark sculptures of gigantic spiders that have made so many shudder—an ambivalent shudder perhaps when one learns that this monster with its horribly hairy legs and death-like head, towering high as a house, is named Maman.
The very irony of the name, and the disturbing, mixed emotions such a portrait of a mother evokes, are symbolic of the work of this artist. Bourgeois may well explain that the monstrous creatures represent “industriousness” (her own mother repaired and rewove old Gobelin tapestries in her home-industry atelier), but we don’t necessarily accept the thinking. We may be puzzled that a woman artist would spend large amounts of time, money and loving attention on an object of archetypal fear and loathing and create sculptures that are perceived as grotesque, aggressive and of questionable
taste, and yet are admired for their emotional impact. But it’s precisely because of her capacity to stir up controversy with her work that she’s been in the headlines for half a century.
“The emotional tenor of my sculpture has remained consistent,” the artist says when asked about her ambition and tenacity. “It is the materials and the resulting form that are constantly changing. Artists will always find new materials and techniques to express the human condition.”
The range of materials she uses is as vast as the horizon—from classic marble and bronze to rubber, latex, wood and fabrics, mirrors, discarded pieces of furniture, whole walk-in wire cages filled with mysteries of a personal and cultural nature—artistic hieroglyphs representing the clutter of life.
The “human condition” we can read in this body of work is made—like the spiders—of unsettling, visceral ambiguity. Attraction and repulsion are constantly in a debate, in a
power play of unsolvable and inconsolable intensity.
When one studies the life story of the artist who was born on Christmas in 1911, one learns that little Louise was teased by her womanising father about the fact that she would not be taken seriously as an artist because she was the wrong gender. Little Louise, with her talent for drawing, would be called in by her mother to draw in the feet of figures in old tapestries that had been water-damaged by their use as wall hangings for warmth during World War I. She would watch her mother and her employees prepare tapestries for export: The cupids in the classic designs had to have their genitals replaced with flowers and fruit. As a result, castration became an artistic symbol in Bourgeois’ work.
Mixed messages of female power and powerlessness were further reinforced when her father invited a live-in governess for Louise who was, in fact, his mistress. This double betrayal and the resulting ambivalent feelings between parent and child reappear throughout her work.
“There is a desire to nurture and survive and, at the same time, there are murderous impulses,” says the artist, who has three sons of her own. “They are all there together, coexisting and conflicting.”
Her famous metal sculpture Nature Study depicts an animal torso with powerful haunches and feet, sleek like a panther, endowed with multiple breasts. What is this beast that has such compelling maleness and at the same time such shiny, attractive breasts? A primordial god-goddess of ancient times? A gender-bender for the 21st century?
Repeatedly, Bourgeois has created object-women in the shape of spoons, knives or door handles. There are numerous versions of a Femme Maison (woman house)—women without a head, their upper bodies imprisoned by a house. On the other hand, there are as many deconstructions of male bodies and male authority (The Blind Leading the Blind, The Destruction of the Father, Arch of Hysteria).
“Since I was a runaway, father figures on these shores (an older generation of artists, particularly the surrealists) rubbed me the wrong way,” she once commented. She goes over these themes again and again as if to exorcise them, in the same way unresolved childhood trauma appears and reworks itself in repetitive dreams and nightmares.
The possibilities of understanding and analysing her art are unlimited. When Bourgeois fills a page with 10 rows of the words “Je t’aime” in red, she makes us wonder, once again, what she had in mind: punishment assigned to a girl who failed to please her father? The obsessive plea of a woman reverting to the regressive ways of a child in order to seduce a lover? The self-ironic statement of an artist who knows that love never entirely leaves childhood longings behind? We look, we search for a meaning, a message: Something inside of us resonates.
“Emotions are universal,” Bourgeois says when asked whether her work can be understood in every culture. “The artist has access to his unconscious through his work. This is a gift, and it is magic. My work does not need any words, by me or anybody else. I don’t owe an explanation of why I work or what the work means to anybody. I only know that I need to make it, that I feel better after I have made it, and that’s magic.”
Renate Stendhal is a writer and writing coach in the San Francisco Bay Area.
