A review by Mary Couzens for EXTRA! EXTRA!

This retrospective exhibition, the first in the U.K. for ninety-five year old Louise Bourgeoisis, is long overdue.  Bourgeois did not reach public attention until MOMA – Museum of Modern Art in her adopted home, New York, showed the first ever retrospective of her work in 1982.  A seminal photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his iconic photography of Patti Smith and many other New York art rock luminaries of the proto Punk era, was used on the publicity material for the exhibition.  Spanning the nearly seventy year career of the French artist, who became a US citizen in 1951 and represented the States in the 1993 Venice Biennale, the current exhibition at Tate Modern focuses on her long standing interest in architecture, particularly as it pertains to the human body and its presence, with all of its pain, phobias and psychological implications. One of six mammoth sculptural spiders Maman (1999), the largest series of spiders created by the artist, as symbols of the protective strength of the mother, another of which graced Tate Modern’s turbine hall at its opening in 2000, now greets visitors from its pride of place on the lawn.

Born on Christmas Day, 1911 in Paris, Bourgeois spent her early childhood in Choisy-le-Roi, just outside of Paris.  She was named after her dominant father, Louis, to whom she bore a striking resemblance.  Beginning in 1922, in Antony, where the family had relocated, and they were made to endure an open affair between her father and the young English governess Sadie Gordon whom he had hired to teach his children English.  The affair, which lasted ten years, was the cause of intense emotional suffering for Louise’s mother, and also made its indelible mark upon the psyche of the young girl and her siblings.  Its variegated dynamics - fear, betrayal, jealously, disappointment, sexuality and familial love have become reoccurring emotional and psychological reference points for Bourgeois’ artworks throughout the course of her career.

Although the exhibition is displayed with the purpose of emphasizing a specific angle of Bourgeois’ oeuvre, the pieces contained within its ten rooms, apart from its first and last, are displayed in, more or less, chronological order.  The stunningly stark, surprisingly moving installation, or Cell as Bourgeois refers to her larger, ‘caged’ pieces, Cell (Choisy) 1990-3 featuring a pink marble replica of the house she grew up in, encased in a large wire framework with grimy panes of glass positioned here an there within its framework like long neglected windows, is the centre piece of Room 1’s displays.  Like a forlorn, forgotten doll’s house, this structure within a structure exudes a mournful air, as though the artist had created it in memory of her long lost childhood. The positioning of the small pink house within its mesh cage allows shadows to loom over it as though a giant were threatening its peace.  A guillotine hanging ominously over the scene serves to reinforce the artist’s concept of what the work is about, which she claimed is, ‘how people destroy themselves within the family and the past being gotten rid of by the present.’ It is, fittingly, accompanied by Bourgeois’ earlier, well known Femme Maison ‘house women’ (1946-47) series of paintings.  The works, incorporating house-like components of architecture as the top section of their figures, with portions of the female body protruding below, are both psychological and feminist as they elude to women’s traditional role as emotional support of the home, at the same time as they, question its validity. Their intermingling also lends an air of Bourgeois’ lingering sense of childhood longing, as well as heralding her growing interest in feminism.

Louise Bourgeois Red Night 1946-48
Oil on canvas
760 x 1525 mm   Daros Collection, Switzerland 

© Louise Bourgeois

Working from her open air ‘studio’ atop the apartment block she lived in in New York in the 40’s with her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater and their three children, Bourgeois created her standing wooden sculptures or Personages, reflecting the horizontals of the neighbouring skyline,once again combining aspects of architecture with those of the human form.  As she observed, ‘Skyscrapers reflect a human condition.  They do not touch.’ Persistent Antagonis (1946-48), which refers to the way in which men ‘show off their penises,’ also conveys the artist’s humour.  As Bourgeois herself claimed, ‘The macho bit is irritating.  I have nothing against the penis.  It is the wearer of the penis.’  At this juncture in the exhibition, it becomes apparent, through He Disappeared into Complete Silence 1947, a series of engravings, which incorporate text with their seemingly simplistic, oddly poignant images, that her writings about her own processes, both artistic and emotional, have inspired deeper exploration into psychological states as her career progressed. 

Personages (1949-53)

(c) Louise Bourgeois: Photo by John Couzens

Originally, the wood and plaster Personages, first shown in exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in New York from 1949 – 53, had no bases and were, consequentially, nailed directly to the floor, enabling visitors to walk amongst them.  Their importance in the overall history of Post War art, alongside of the more appreciated in their day works of her male contemporaries such as David Smith, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock cannot be over-estimated. The irregular, slightly warped quality of the Personages imbues them with a sense of vulnerability which, no doubt, reflects on Bourgeios sense of displacement when living in New York.  Her ability to view her work as a form of ‘exorcism’ enabled her to effectively, ‘sculpt her emotions.’

In keeping with Bourgeois’ contention that her work, ‘…grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group,’ the artist imaginatively chose to group sculptures that had formerly stood alone.  Quarantania I (1947 – 53) represents her own family unit, the central figure of which represents herself with her three sons around her. Ever experimental, Bourgeois returned to the art scene after time spent focused on family only to be re-aligned with some of the younger artists of the day, like Eva Hesse and Bruce Naaman, due to her use of formerly untried materials. During this time, her interest in spirals and animal dwellings such as caves, nests and burrows also became apparent in her work, which, once again, offers ambivalence; as such structures could be viewed as either havens, or traps.

The late 1960’s saw Bourgeois creating art from poured materials which in her own words ‘could only be obtained through that process.'  Materials such as brown latex poured onto cloth, enabled a new softness and sensuality to emerge in her work.  Definitive amongst this grouping is The Destruction of the Father (1974) a massive tableau composed of rubber, latex and wood, lit with an eerie red light.  This seminal work takes as its inspiration from a dark, fairytale-like fantasy in which Bourgeois and her siblings literally carve her domineering father up like a roast on the dinner table he formerly ruled, and devour him. Once again, the artist’s use of shapes that seem vaguely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time sets the stage for unsettling ambivalence in the minds of viewers. This exhibition marks the U.K. debut of this seminal piece.

The remarkably fluid marble artworks on show in Room 7 display Bourgeois’ uncanny way with that traditionally difficult to master material, which she first began to work with in 1967.  There are so many fine examples of the artist’s imaginative craftsmanship here that it would be difficult to narrow one’s appreciation to just one.  The location of the room itself serves to heighten the experience of viewing some of the works, particularly those of a more sexually ambivalent nature reflecting the androgyny of ancient Rome which, set against the huge glass windows, also showcase the Millennium Footbridge, designed by sculptor Anthony Caro, as well as Sir Christopher Wren’s collosal structure across the Thames, St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In my opinion, which in itself, could be seen as being somewhat ambiguous in this case, Room 8 contains the shining jewels of the exhibition, in the oft tawdry guise of several of Bourgeois’ room-sized, psychologically penetrating Cells or installations. Composed in the 1990’s, when the artist was finally in a position to be able to afford the rent of  a huge studio in Brooklyn, one of the large scale pieces – Precious Liquids (1992) is actually housed inside of a disused wooden water tower which she salvaged from the roof of the building! The two ‘Red Rooms’ – Parent and Child (1994) in this exhibition are reminiscent of the ‘red room’ in Jane Eyre into which Charlotte Bronte’s young heroine was thrust as a form of childhood punishment. The ‘parent’ room contains several sets of red moulded hands grasping at one another, along with many multicoloured wheels of spinning thread, assorted disused furnishings, and several glass orbs, some in translucent scarlet, all of which are intermingled with other ‘world of their own’ artefacts, offering viewers glimpses of their oddly effective arrangement through the joints of its aged, wooden doors. Another, Cell (Clothes) 1996 features an affecting arrangement of clothing spanning fifty years, which the artist herself once wore.

Room 9 brings viewers full circle, back to Bourgeois’ childhood occupation in the family tapestry repair business, with the artist ‘composing’ pieces from fragmented bits of fabric, which represent family groups and/or the heads of individuals caught, seemingly, unaware in the midst of rather startling moments of self-realisation. 

Louise Bourgeois Seven in Bed 2001

Fabric, stainless steel, glass and wood

Courtesy Cheim and Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois

The final room, much like the first, is comprised of pieces that draw on themes found throughout Bourgeois’ entire body of work, with its ‘curiosity cabinets’ acting as a sort of retrospect in miniature for the exhibition as a whole.  Pieces made from many of the materials the artist has worked with throughout the course of her career are represented here: bronze, fabric, marble, latex, all reflecting, in some way, on her lingering fascination with the body’s politics and presence in relation to that of its surrounding architectural landscape.  As a whole, the exhibition itself serves as a definitive example of the fascination its viewers will, no doubt, either further, or, possibly, develop as a result of attending, and, experiencing Louise Bourgeois.

www.tate.org.uk/modern

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