Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974, plaster, latex, wood, fabric, 237.8 × 362.3 × 248.6 cm (93 5/8 × 142 5/8 × 97 7/8 in). Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the first museum retrospective of Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911). Historic in and of itself, as the first retrospective of a female artist at the Museum of Modern Art, it belatedly acknowledged the pioneering contribution to postwar art of the already 71-year-old Franco-American artist and hailed her as foremother of feminist art. Her canonising, however, only signaled new beginnings: Bourgeois continued to renew her art, personifying today the paradox of the eldest producer of intriguingly contemporary art, and began weaving the fabric of a public persona whose origin myths (the tapestry restoration business of her parents in France, the infidelity of her father, and the early death of her mother, etc.) have overwhelmed her critical reception.

In contrast to the thrill of the revelations of MoMA’s 1982 re-discovery of what was still an artists’ artist, her latest transatlantic retrospective is a surprise-free celebration of, mainly, the sculptural oeuvre of a living legend of outgrown popularity and scholarly scrutiny. [i] Highlighting the frequency with which this great ‘deformer and archetype remaker’ [ii] radically reinvented her sculptural practice, the selected works on view amount to an exhilarating encounter of signature Bourgeois masterpieces and highlights of modern and postmodern sculpture interspersed with a small sample of the abstract imagination of the artist’s obsessive drawing making. A great variety of Bourgeois’ early totemic wood figures — comprised of violently carved or tenderly stuck parts, unstably posed and conceived as surrogates of the people she left in France when she moved to New York in 1938 — exemplify the conflation of Cubist and Surrealist language and the domestic economy of saving and assembling with which Bourgeois countered the formalist principles and industrial materials of postwar American sculpture. Ambiguous bodily forms or formless matter — lying on the floor, hung from the ceiling or crawling on the walls — illustrate her ‘eccentric’ turn to ‘pliability’ through plaster and latex in the early 1960s, a turn that prefigured, as much as took part in, the postminimalist return to the body through the ‘informe’ and process art. [iii] Bronze and marble pieces of the 1970s and 1980s manifest the mutations of her abstract vocabulary in classic sculptural material. Claustrophobic Cells and rooms from the 1990s track her staging of the found and made object in hybrid sculptural installations, while soft, crudely sewn, stuffed figures sample the unsettling effect of what Linda Nochlin has labeled the artist’s ‘old age’, rather than ‘late’, style. [iv]

I saw the exhibition three times, yet only in its New York version. The first time, I went as an unconditional admirer and left with the tears of an aging daughter of an ailing mother in my eyes, triggered by the unmistaken charge and affect of Bourgeois’ unique — both abstract and figurative as well as violent and restorative — materialisation of emotion and cradling of memory. How else could I respond to the capping jars that healingly scar a black marble back in Ventouse, 1990, the urinal bowl gaping next to a deathbed in Cell I, 1991, the tenderly arranged, dusty glassware balancing on fragile glass shelves in Le Defi, 1991, or the familiar yellowing of the old silk undergarments of her youth that are hung from arthritically outsized bones and painfully thin hangers in Cell VII, 1998? The second time, it was a collective pilgrimage led by Marina Abramovic, who instructed us to approach the works in complete silence after having made us perform rituals of purification. I left disconcerted by Abramovic’s stealing of the spotlight and concerned about the difficulty of restoring the perceptual innocence of Bourgeois’ audience, given the inescapable echoes of the artist’s knowing story-telling, whether it distills personal traumas or cites textbook bourgeois psychodramas. The third time I went as a feminist scholar in prospect of this review and left skeptical about the curatorial merits of the exhibition in its current venue.

Due to the shape of the museum, the display of Bourgeois’ work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is in theory particularly advantageous. The unfolding of the thread of the work of this great yarn-spinner along the museum’s gyrating ramps echoes a signature Bourgeois motif — the spiral — that ranges from the fecal arrangement of her plaster Lair, 1962, and the circular paneling of her Cells to the repetitive circles of her drawings and the coiling rings of the (interchangeably suffocating and liberating) cocoon that engulfs the (possibly self-portraying) bronze Spiral Woman, 1984. Moreover, the enfolding of the works in the museum’s layered ramps allows comparisons that disrupt the linearity of the viewer’s itinerary, pointing to the principle of ‘consistency’ that underlies the formal and psychic sources of the incredible variety of Bourgeois’ output. [v]

Yet the promised dialogue of exhibits and architecture is defeated by the leveling effect of the works’ didactically chronological parataxis and clustering in isolated architectural prosceniums that disrobe individual pieces of the psychodynamics of viewing that they enact. The regretful inaccessibility, for instance, to the space of her 1940s’ totemic figures deprives the viewer both of the ‘one-to-one confrontation’ that their initial installation at the Peridot Gallery entailed and of the experience of the relation of the one with the others that is a constitutive element of Bourgeois’ formal and psychic imagery. [vi] The abject horizontality of several of her 1960s’ pieces is also compromised by the tilted ramps and raised display surfaces of the museum. Furthermore I disagree with the climactic ending of the exhibition with the encased copulating stuffed black Couple IV, 1997. Chosen at the expense of the abjectness of the artist’s latest abstract cloth sculptures currently on view in New York, it prematurely seals the narrative of the artist’s continuing formal achievements and reinforces the psychobiographic tendencies of Bourgeois’ understanding by means of a disturbing ‘primal’ scene.

Despite curatorial limitations, one of the most important threads of Bourgeois’ work should not be neglected as a given: the radical ways in which — avoiding a reductive defense of sexual difference, while embracing the maternal in new terms — the artist managed to speak ‘in, of and from the feminine’ and expose the patriarchal foundations of art and society. [vii] A painting triptych of her famous Femme Maison, 1945–47, introduces not only the beginnings of Bourgeois as an artist associated with the Surrealist circles of prewar Paris and postwar New York, but her own early introduction of the theme of domesticity and motherhood. Hovering between paintings and ‘coloured in drawings’, they present sexual female bodies whose heads hide inside architectural facades, pierced only by hysterically gesturing hands or hair. [viii] Femme Maison [woman house] puns doubly on housewife and ‘femme fatale’, mocking, as Mignon Nixon has put it, the Surrealist ‘exquisite corps’ in a dissident gesture against Surrealism: as feminist cartoons, these hybrid creatures help Bourgeois make a “rejoinder to surrealism’s jokes at the expense of women” (allowed only the role of femme fatale, hysteric, muse, phallic mother and housewife) while as near-self-portraits they expose ‘the predicament of a woman artist and mother, homesick in exile … trying to make it as a surrealist in New York.’ [ix] Although exorcised through art, the taboo topic of ‘repressed maternal aggression’ resurfaces with a subversive defiance of the sentimentality of patriarchically defined maternity in her lesser known Portrait of Jean-Louis, 1947–49. An ambiguous portrait of Bourgeois’ son, featured as a fragile architectural façade that emulates the ‘beauty of New York skyscrapers’, it was conceived, according to the artist, after an incident of Jean-Louis’ misbehavior that makes the fragility of his legs and the aggressiveness of the windows that scar his wooden body quite unsettling. As a figure of both anxiety and pre-oedipal ‘jouissance’, the mother underlies disparate works that range from Bourgeois’ exploration of ‘the beginnings of subjectivity’ through soft configurations of part-objects and visceral interiors to her staging of painful memories, often related to her own mother’s sickness and death, in the Cells. Compare for instance the tender and yet repulsive mothering of the ambiguous — both penile and breast-like — form by its double in Trani Episode, 1971, with the nightmarishly tender caress of marble, cut-off, hands that fondle needy palms in various Cells (as in Cell [You better grow up], 1993). Look again at the tenderly crushed baby leg that is birthed underneath a pink marble sphere surrounded by the inscription ‘Do you love me?’ What Nixon has convincingly analysed as the ‘maternal ambivalence’ that underpins Bourgeois’ art is further intimated by the abstract ‘appendances of maternal obligation’ that burden the central figure of Quarantania I, 1947–53, but is also monumentalised in her more recent, both aggressive and talismanically protective, ‘maternal imagoes’: the She-Fox (a decapitated and multi-teated hybrid monster that is evoked by the inclusion in the exhibition of its white marble variation Nature Study, 1984–94) and the enormous Spider (that as a stand-in for Bourgeois and the powerful female artist justifiably receives the viewer at the museum’s lobby).

The paradigm-shifting and taboo-breaking variety with which the artist spoke of the pleasures and the burdens of maternal subjectivity but also imag(in)ed a ‘maternal-infantile relation’ attests, throughout the exhibition, to an alternative sabotage of phallocentricism whose feminist potential supersedes the facile, parodic ‘posing’ of the Phallus or cannibalising of the Father (as in Fillette, 1968, the famous latex penis that Bourgeois cradled as a baby for Mapplethorpe and here hangs as a repulsive piece of meat at the butcher’s, or her nightmarishly staged meal of latex body parts in The Destruction of the Father, 1974). For an artist who spoke of the feminine in non-normative terms and who overcame the binary logic of phallocentricism to speak about sexuality through the ambiguous duality of forms that undo gender difference, her latest return to tropes and materials of femininity through stuffed cloth and fashion items — the pink silks of femininity, which she excavates from her closets to talk of the lived performances of femininity and mourn its exile from her aged body, as in Pink Days and Blue Days, 1997, for instance — seems regressive as much as sentimental. [x] Speaking of the experience of aging ‘from the feminine’ and casting sexual fantasies in what Nochlin laments as post-sexual age has its own taboo-breaking potential, however. As a hard-won victory of this good/bad mother of feminist art, it renders the humour of the fantasy of the pornographic Couple IV not such an unfit end to the show after all.


[i] The exhibition has already been presented in different form at the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and will travel to two more venues in the US.
[ii] Robert Storr, “L’Esprit Géometrique,” in Louise Bourgeois, New York: Rizzoli, 2008, 28 (exhibition catalogue originally published by Tate Enterprises Ltd in 2007).
[iii] Bourgeois talked of her turn from rigidity to pliability on the occasion of Lucy Lippard’s show Eccentric Abstraction in 1966.
[iv] Linda Nochlin, ‘Old Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois’, in Louise Bourgeois, 188-96.
[v] ‘I am consistent in my spiral’, Louise Bourgeois, ‘Interview with Paulo Herkenhoff’, in Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon, London, 2003, p. 12.
[vi] See Alex Potts, ‘Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1999, pp. 39–53.
[vii] Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, Routledge, London, 1988.
[viii] As Robert Storr has referred to Bourgeois’ painting in Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon, p. 49.
[ix] Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005. The following analysis is informed by Nixon’s understanding of the role of the maternal in Bourgeois’ work and all related quotes come from the above book.
[x] A more radical take on fashion is evidenced by the remains of her 1978 installation Confrontation, stage for her performance A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts where the audience was invited to watch people modeling costumes with bulbous forms that evoked new gender models that transcended the opposition between male and female (presented in a separate room of the Museum — a significant digression from the spiraling itinerary along Bourgeois’ sculptural oeuvre).