Louise Bourgeois: Her Own Daughter

An artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and very much at odds with what the artist felt or wished to express when he began… The artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself. (1)

Louise Bourgeois

Women artists from any period in history are more likely to have dramatic and tragic stories that can serve as ready-made explanations for any symbolism in their work. Artists biographies often provide an easy but limiting and reductive view of art. Often artists contribute to this approach by sharing their personal lives, letters and journals with the public. Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), a French American artist, who was born in Paris and died in New York City, at a certain point in her career started to feed art historians and critics biographical explanations for much of her work. What was her motivation in doing so we can only guess: perhaps she wished to expand her audience, provide an easier access? Perhaps, she sensed that this way she could be in greater control of her own story.

The current show at The Jewish Museum, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, on view until September 12, relies heavily on diaries, letters and notes written by the artist. The fifty artworks, many of them large sculptural compositions, are “contextualized”, as the museum's website explains, by the artist’s original writings. The curator of the exhibition Philip Larratt-Smith argues that notes, postcards, and diary entries, displayed on the gallery walls provide an insight into the artist's mind and reveal psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration.

Bourgeois writings reveal her fascination with psychoanalysis as a form of self-examination and self knowledge. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who never met with Bourgeois, but was a guiding presence for many of the doctors who treated the artist. Freud is a silent god-father of the show, the voice of validation and authority. His theories resound from every wall of the exhibition, revealing the backdrop, providing context, explaining, and presumably deepening our understanding.

“The sexual behaviour of a human being lays down the pattern for all his other modes of reacting to life,” – the example of one of Freud’s pronouncements, featured on museum’s walls, that would fit any art exhibition ancient or modern.

Judging from the abundance of the wall text, it appears that curators of Freud’s Daughter wanted to make a catalog more than put up an exhibition. Ironically, Bourgeois work, while cerebral, is primarily about the act of looking. Many of her pieces, such as the architectural compositions Cells ,which the artist began making in 1989, are cages or rooms of various sizes, full of symbolic objects, emphasizing looking as an activity. But in Freud's Daughter there are more reading materials than in a typical show at the Morgan Library, except that you have to stand while doing so.

The focus of the show comes from the obvious but misleading connection between Bourgeois struggles with mental health and themes in her work. Larratt-Smith curatorial choices suggest direct links between Bourgeois work and her emotional trials. In fact, after the death of the three most important people in her life: the mother, the father, and the husband. Bourgeois underwent psychoanalytic treatment in NYC from 1952 to 1985 with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, and attempted suicide on at least one occasion. Yet, she lived to be 98. During her long career she created an enormous output of writings, paintings, prints, and sculpture. She enjoyed collaborating with teams of various assistants, printmakers, choreographers, and composers. In the last decades of her life, the artist hosted weekly salons in her brownstone on West 20th street in Chelsea, now home to the artist’s foundation. Bourgeois also raised three children and if her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater wasn’t perfect, all we know is that she never got divorced. If psychoanalysis rescued the artist from a dark place, Bourgeois opened the windows, and stitched her own rope ladders.

In her journals and later in her essays and lectures, Bourgeois argues (for many pages and in all sorts of variations on the theme) that the past never stopped tormenting her, but that it was also her rich well of inspiration.

Some of us are so obsessed with the past that we die of it. It is the

attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven and it is really

the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can quite

grasp. They might want to reconstruct something of the past to

exorcise it. It is that the past for certain people has such a hold and

such a beauty....

Everything I do was inspired by my early life. (2)

In her article "Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies," art historian Anne Wagner argues that:

In the case of Bourgeois this has made for an almost unprecedented opportunity for self-authorship: she herself plotted, cast, rehearsed and illustrated with a documentarist's fervor a familial drama of abuses and derelictions, from which script, it is then inevitably assumed, her art must necessarily be said to have been derived. (3)

Throughout her long life the artist mined her childhood traumas for an endless flow of images and ideas. She worked out variations on the themes of eternal-castration, the drama of one-against-many, and the trauma of abandonment. Akin to a savvy composer, she would return again and again to perfect her melodies. When Bourgeois chose to share her biography with the public in Child Abuse project, which was first published in December of 1982 in Artforum, her past became part of her artistic oeuvre. Child Abuse is a photo essay where the artist revealed the source of one of her childhood traumas: the perceived betrayal of the father, who had an affair with the artist’s English tutor Sadie, with a tacit approval from Bourgeois’s mother. In that work Bourgeois used found objects combined with her own sculptures and photography, to tell deeply personal and evocative story. She continued to engage the same strategy and techniques – art as a form of exorcism, throughout her remaining life. Coincidentally, in the late 1980s, a symbolic architecture of the Cells, each one of which is a personal museum of memories and memorabilia, emerged as a dominant form of expression in her work.

One of the most powerful and monumental works in the show is a composition constructed from interconnected cells – Passage Dangereux (1997). It completely fills the fourth gallery on the second floor of the museum. The work is made out of metal, wood, tapestry, rubber, marble, steel, glass, bronze, bones, flax, and mirrors. It is a passageway which consists of four distinct interconnected areas that are filled with enigmatic objects – a collection of Bourgeois personal symbols – a cabinet of curiosities.

The elongated womb shape of the passage is important. In her notes from the 1960s Bourgeois wrote that she was deeply impressed by a visit to the Lascaux caves, and the effect of the “enveloping negative form.” As Wagner points out, for Bourgeois, the mysteries of the cave held, “the wild and hidden reaches of sex and death.” In the pre--pandemic era the passageway could be walked through and experienced from within, as the artist intended, but now we can only look through the wire mesh from a safe distance outside the cages. The impact of the work is somewhat diminished since we are supposed to be lured into the metaphorical body like moths that are caught by Bourgeois famous Maman spiders, with the bait of the enigmatic offerings. (4)

In the first little room of Passage, there is a slab of gleaming white rock with attached bunny ears. Several small round mirrors on long metal stems poke their heads inviting us to take a closer look and further involving us in the mystery that is hidden here. What happened to the bunny? The sparkling stone is listening but what it learns will never leave this room. At the opposite wall there is a low scruffy wooden table. A bulbous glass jar and a coiled metal spiral twisted into a croissant shape, sitting on top as if they were two partners in crime. Both have the same small round mirrors poking out their little heads, ready to absorb and unable to communicate.

Louise Bourgeois, Passage Dangereux (detail), 1997, Photo: Irina Sheynfeld — Louise Bourgeois, *Passage Dangereux* (detail), 1997, Photo: Irina Sheynfeld

Each Cell deals with fear. Fear is pain. Often it is not perceived as pain, because it is always disguising itself.

Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at. The Cells either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate. (5)

In the next chamber glass spheres filled with bones are facing the abandoned replica of the child’s swing that is hung in front of the tapestry. A tapestry, wall text informs us, is a potent symbol of childhood for Bourgeois, since her father and mother were restorers of antique wall hangings and young Bourgeois was trained to take over her family’s business. Her mother taught the artist the details of the chemical composition of the dyes, as well as “the problems of drawing and color and the various historical styles of old tapestries.” (6)

As we move down the narrow hallway of Passage we encounter four green glass spheres of various sizes sitting in a circle on four tiny chairs. The biggest orb is perched on a scrap of tapestry, as if signalling that he is the head of this small family and that his position is the highest. Each member of this sphere union silently absorbed its own world. In a small niche, facing these four, is a wooden replica of the electric chair. It speaks of the torture, incarceration, experimentation, and pain. We wonder what sort of shared activity these four enjoy if a torture device is their only article of their domestic comfort.

The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It’s a circle going round and round. Pain can begin at any point and turn in either direction.

The most evocative part of this work is the last room where levitating chairs hang in the air, signaling that the physical laws of gravity are no longer operational. We enter the time outside of time – the point of existence when the truth is being revealed. The drama that is unfolding in the room is enacted, as if on stage, by furniture. The doctor/father armchair is the god of this world. Hi is the one who can see all and understand all. Other actors are scattered around the corners: there is a small child’s desk. It seems to represent a small child or an innocent onlooker. Not far from it is an old but still elegant chair upholstered in tapestry, it looks like the mother chair. In the center of the room the main event is staged and everyone on stage seems to be absorbed in watching it. It is the sex act reenacted by bronze feet on long metal rods that are connected by one polished metal box. The enigmatic black box where eyes meet and all vanishing points converge. It is easy to miss a small spider trying to escape in the corner of the room. Even though spiders in Bourgeois self-made mythology are always mamans, here it seems to be the soul that is making its last desperate attempt to escape. The spider is the only free and active creature in this trap. It is too large to make it through the metal mesh and too small to influence the course of unfolding performance.

It is easy to see Passage Dangereux as the battlefield of Bourgeois memories, traumas combined with her interest with psychoanalysis. The artist's own explanations are compelling and add depth of understanding to her personal symbols. Yet, the work is more powerful and evocative on its own. Her images lend themselves to be interpreted by anyone in their own personal ways. The work is also powerful in purely formal terms and a composition of elements that have no meaning beyond their visual qualities. As interesting as Freud’s Daughter's intellectual approach is, the show would be more powerful if it included just art; the rest could be put away in the black box of the catalog.

The artist studied her own self closely, making notes and moving forward with the help of her ups and downs, like a savvy seafarer taking advantage of the wind and unafraid of the turbulent sea. On November 19, 1944 she wrote in her diary, “… physically I’m very tired and calm and feverish. I’m irritable with children, highly sensitive, as if on the verge of tears. But this condition seems favorable to intellectual work. Make notes another time and compare them.”

***

Ms. Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Notes

1. Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Laure Bernadac, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), P. 66.

2. Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Laure Bernadac, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008)

3. Anne M. Wagner, “Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies.” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 3-23. Accessed June 21, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360632.

4. Lascaux is a complex of caves estimated to be 20,000 years old. The discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings on September 12, 1940 sent countless ripples through French culture, and influenced artists, writers and philosophers worldwide.

5. Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Laure Bernadac, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), P. 205

6. Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Laure Bernadac, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), P. 67

Bibliography

Bourgeois, Louise. “FREUD'S TOYS.” The online edition of Artforum International Magazine, January 1, 1990. https://www.artforum.com/print/199001/freud-s-toys-34249.

Wagner, Anne M. "Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies." Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 3-23. Accessed June 21, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360632.

Cooke, Rachel. “She’ll Put a Spell on You.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, October 14, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art.

Cotter, Holland. “Louise Bourgeois, Influential Sculptor, Dies at 98.” The New York Times. The New York Times, May 31, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/arts/design/01bourgeois.html.

Blog post by Irina Sheynfeld

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