Louise Bourgeois
The Woven Child
Many people will have first become aware of the art of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois when they saw her giant spider statue, which was sited outside or in London’s Tate Modern for some years. Simultaneously terrifying (at least to arachnophobes like me) and fascinating, the spider - one of many spider sculptures made by Bourgeois - represented certain themes that were dear to Bourgeois. The spinning of webs chimed with Bourgeois’s childhood, growing up with parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. Bourgeois herself would, as a child, draw on some of the tapestries, while her mother was particularly skilled at weaving. Bourgeois lost her mother when she was 22, and the bereavement was one of the factors that haunted her in her long creative life.
Bourgeois’s spider statues often depicted the arachnid lurking protectively over a sac of eggs. Motherhood was another theme that recurred in Bourgeois’s art. The predator status of the spider also interested Bourgeois. Much of her work is concerned with the dichotomy between destroying and mending. Some of this stemmed from her childhood, where she experienced fights between her very different parents - her cool, logical mother and her emotional father. Her father had a series of mistresses, including the family’s English tutor, and this sense of betrayal pervades other pieces.
One of Bourgeois’s spiders does feature at this exhibition, but most of the works here relate to her interest in working with fabrics in the last decade of her life. But they are as far from soft furnishings as is possible, mining her past experiences and preoccupations to fashion work with extraordinary psychological depth. .
Memories - of her childhood, her mother, her exile at the start of the War, her youth and sexuality, and her combination of different roles in her lie - were key to Bourgeois’s work. In the opening room, a spangly black evening dress hangs from cattle bone hangers, along with a silk shirt and some flimsy slips and nightgowns. The dress and shirt are stuffed to give the impression that they are being worn. The clothes float like ethereal ghosts, shards of memories of the artist’s youth, forever suspended in time. At the base of the sculpture are the words ‘Seamstress, Mistress, Distress, Stress’, which hint to the mixed emotions Bourgeois associated with her youth.
Bourgeois left France in 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, escaping to New York with her new historian husband Robert Goldwater. This move to an unfamiliar place led to a feeling of displacement and exile. She and Robert had three sons, but Bourgeois was never comfortable with being defined as a mother or homemaker, as can be seen in The Good Mother, in which a naked woman lies, post partum, with her newborn baby between her legs, trapped in a glass box with steel edges and the sort of wooden floor you might find in a domestic setting. Although the umbilical cord joining the baby to the mother has been cut (leaving an abnormally long stalk), a strange additional umbilical cord joins the umbilicus of the mother to the baby, suggesting perhaps memories of the mother’s unbreachable bond with her own long-departed mother.
Bourgeois created numerous cage sculptures throughout her life, some of which are featured here. In one, a figure sits, bent over in anguish or pain. The grille behind her is the close cross-hatched metal gauze of a cage, entrapping the figure, yet leaving it also exposed to the gaze of others.
The theme of voyeurism is raised again in a headless torso of a woman with a house on her belly. As well as possibly relating to the weight of domestic drudgery, Bourgeois has talked about the woman being naked yet in full view, watched yet not able to hide.
Woman as a sex object is shown in a disturbing fabric statue of a woman with no facial features, kneeling, prone, her buttocks and breasts bulbous, her spiked heels her only clothing, waiting to be penetrated. Reduced to her sexuality, she has no identity of her own, and exists only in relation to the male gaze. There may also be S&M connotations here - the woman may wish to be objectified. But her lack of control is suggested by the fact that she has no arms - she is powerless; a receptacle.
The different identities Bourgeois related to - mother, wife, artist - sometimes seemed to pull her in different directions, and this conflict is apparent in this three-headed statue. Of course it was not only the identities of the present that tugged her from one head space to another. It was also the memories of her parents’ fighting, her father’s repeated infidelities, nursing her mother when she herself was a child, and the stark grief she felt when her mother died young.
As an adult, Bourgeois talked about the power she felt when she wrung the fabrics she washed in the local river. For her, the wrenching motion was associated with regaining control, and she spoke of how as a child she imagined the material she was squeezing and twisting was the neck of her father’s mistress. She used the spiral in her work to contrast the potency of that control with the passivity expected of many women. Her Spiral Woman demonstrates these two extremes, and she explained that tightening the spiral was for her a method of self protection, fear causing self compaction and retreat, to the point of disappearance, while relaxing the spiral and exposing herself was a show of trust and being open to life.
Another way in which Bourgeois sought to gain control was through methodical repetition, ordering objects to counteract feelings of chaos. Her mother had been rational, and Bourgeois learnt from her and from geometry - Bourgeois studied maths before becoming a full-time artist - the comfort that could be gained by these calming tasks. The soft materials used in these stacks suggest maintenance of openness despite the strict rules of arranging smaller objects by size.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Bourgeois was good friends with Tracey Emin, and that the two collaborated on some work. Bourgeois shared with Emin an immense emotional insight and honesty. I won’t forget Emin’s chilling anecdote - delivered with her usual, chirpy sanguine cheer - even when she had cancer, she never took the easy route of victim - of being a finalist in a disco dancing competition as a teenager. Lost in the euphoria of dancing, she was jolted to full consciousness by cries of ‘slag!’ from a jeering group of lads, some of whom she had been intimate with. The double standard of those boys, who were happy to enjoy sex with Emin, yet vile enough to shame her for also liking sex, is something that Bourgeois too explored. Many of these fabric sculptures depict sexual women, and yet their sexuality is never a simple joy as is the case with men. There are couples engaged in intimacy, but the fear of abandonment and the onset of pregnancy and subsequent shrinking of identity and autonomy are never far away.
Many of Bourgeois’s works depict pregnancy. There is an organic, bodily sense to these pieces; the capacity of a woman to hold and create new life. Yet Bourgeois didn’t buy into the myth sold to many women of her era that transitioning from sexual being to maternal one was women’s only role in life. Bringing up a child is hard work, and Bourgeois sought to relay how, despite the joy, it eroded her of her identity. Being reduced to a milking machine is wittily depicted in one sculpture, where white thread running from a figure’s breasts lead to spools of thread looking like milk urns.
And yet Bourgeois clearly valued being a mother. One set piece conveys the anxiety she experienced when her youngest child, Alain, seemed to not want to budge from her uterus. With a backdrop of hall-of-mirrors glass to suggest gaps and distortions in memory caused by stress, the piece, The Reticent Child, shows a pregnant woman on the left, next to a pink gauze covering a sleeping baby, perhaps the foetus comfortable in utero; a pregnant woman with the child clearly visible inside her belly in the middle, and, on the right, the pregnant woman giving birth and then lying, exhausted, on a hospital bed, with a clearly moved man - the father? - standing nearby.
Bourgeois’s visceral obsession with psychological loss and abandonment segued into a fascination with physical loss. Some of the figures here are amputees, some with a prosthetic arm or leg, some with a stump. In fact, as an amputee myself, I was amused to see a man at the press view turn from a sculpture of a woman with a prosthetic leg to see me hobbling towards him. For a millisecond, his widening eyes indicated surprise and perhaps a split second thought that I might be part of the exhibition.
But Bourgeois’s preferred themes don’t mean that she couldn’t also produce creations that were ‘simply’ aesthetically beautiful. This is evident in many of the patchworks upstairs. Some convey her interest in geometry, with bright patterns one would be awed to see in a kaleidoscope:
Others are reminiscent of Rothko; lines or blocks of colour, but without the latter’s characteristic bleeding of one colour into the next, with its often painful evocations of being enclosed in the safety of the womb.
Bourgeois died at the age of 98, in 2010. Her body of work exemplifies the way many modern women artists deal with emotions and memories, as well as with the representational, conceptual, sexual, and aesthetic, like most male artists. More appreciated now than she was in her lifetime, she deserves the belated critical acclaim.