Over 30 years have gone since Louise Bourgeois was revealed to the world with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Showcasing her deeply personal work, the event singled her out as one of the most important 20th and 21st-century sculptors.
A recently opened exhibition at Stockholm's Moderna Museet currently celebrates Bourgeois in a unique way. The most comprehensive Swedish exhibition of her work to date (showcasing over 100 pieces), "Louise Bourgeois - I Have Been to Hell and Back" starts right outside the museum with her monumental work "Maman", one of her gigantic spider sculptures that won her the nickname of "Spiderwoman" (and was conceived as an ode to her mother's protective and nurturing power in a frightening world and as a metaphor for her mother who worked as a weaver), and features many pieces that have never before been shown publicly.
The works included - forty-seven sculptures, one of her little cells (enclosed rooms furnished with psychologically charged pieces such as sculptures of body parts and fragments of cloth that were metaphors for her life), one painting, and fifty-four works on paper and fabric - are displayed in nine rooms. They stretch over seven decades and aim to show the range of Bourgeois' work and the themes she favoured, highlighting her experiments with different materials and techniques and in various scales.
Born in 1911 in France, Bourgeois first studied mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne, then abandoned them for art and started her career as an artist when she moved to New York in the late '30s after marrying American art historian Robert Goldwater. She began creating semi-abstract sculptures from the mid-'40s and, influenced after the Second World War by the European surrealist artists, became a member of the emerging New York school of abstract expressionism.
In the '60s Bourgeois experimented a lot with different materials such as bronze, stone, but also rubber, latex and plaster to express complex feelings. Her works became larger, but the main inspirations remained the same: at the core of her pieces there was her family, the relationship with her parents - Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois who owned a gallery that dealt in antique tapestries - and her father's infidelities and the traumas and resentments they caused her as a child (when she was eleven she discovered her English governess Sadie was also her father's mistress).
Quite often, Bourgeois incorporated pieces of cloth - elements that somehow connected once again the artist with her family and their business (as a girl she also helped in her mother's tapestry restoration business) into figures or formations that had some human shape. Fertility, physicality and sexuality mixed with a will to fragment the human body and explore it, while tackling (always with a healthy dose of subversive humour) issues such as fear, violence, danger and destruction.
"Louise Bourgeois's art, which encompasses a range of emotions, is both complex and radical. At times it can be frightening and very direct. Bourgeois expanded the realm of three-dimensional art and became an inspiring innovator in the field of sculpture. She fathoms the depths of human existence, and makes visible her struggle to combine the roles of artist, mother, and wife in the twentieth century. The perspective she formulates is quite different from the male point of view that has for centuries described and explained the world," states in an official press release Iris Müller-Westermann, the curator of the exhibition at the Moderna Museet.
In Bourgeois' practice to sculpt meant to cut and shape, to slice deeply and shallowly, so that different shapes – at times scary, upsetting and disquieting mind landscapes of forms that revealed her inner turmoil - would emerge out of her sculptures. Her unique way of sculpting with cloth and soft materials human silhouettes and disembodied body parts has very naturally turned her into an inspiring figure for creatives working in the fashion industry.
One of the latest example is Simone Rocha. The young designer didn't turn to the artist for her A/W 2015-16 collection, but returned to her: Rocha has indeed written her college thesis on the fascinating Bourgeois. Young Rocha didn't use her, though, to reference patriarchal power as embodied in her case by her designer father John.
The designer moved indeed from Bourgeois' wall relief Mamelles (1991) a series of breasts in pale pink synthetic rubber reproducing a frieze-like formation with an intense emotional value that objectified the male gaze upon a woman's body parts while referencing the raw feminist energy that the nurturing breasts provide.
The first designs in the runway show were sculpted velvet pieces, with padded petal/breast-like elements not in pale flesh colours, but in body defining black, though towards the end of the presentation these padded elements took the shape of cuddling pink clouds that embraced the body on the shoulder or around the hip area of tulle and chiffon dresses. Some of the designs echoed modern avant-garde pieces like Comme des Garçons' body morphing garments, but there was also emphasis on history in the tapestry creations.
Inspired by Bourgeois' parents' tapestry factory, Rocha created capes and dresses in chenille brocade (sourced at an ancient manufacturer in Lyons) with dramatically cocooning silhouettes and romantic frills and ruffles. In some cases the designer tried to experiment a bit with the theme of historical "camouflage" expanding the tapestry textile to bags and shoes.
Belted wool coats with synthetic hair erupting from the shoulders like artificial fur introduced a dark element, rebalanced by the prettiness of silk dresses with side ruffles. This sort of perfect balance between gothic and romantic moods that young generations love and that has made the fortune of this young designer also appeared in the red-and-white checkered pieces (colours that evoked the palette of Bourgeois' "10 AM is when you come to me" or "The Birth") towards the end of the show that seemed to mix childhood (Rocha's own childhood in Ireland with her arty family) and horror (Bourgeois' traumatic childhood that at the same time provided the artist with endless inspirations, and that never lost for her its magic, mystery and drama), and in the nude tulle dresses covered in floral embroideries.
These pretty embroideries on sheer fabrics strengthened the balance between soft and violent moods suspended between Heaven and Hell; Bourgeois' art is after all one of violence and counter violence, it is visceral and psychic, and it tells a story of angst and cruelties.
In the mid-1990s, Bourgeois created fabric drawings and sculptures with materials that included her old clothes but also her late mother and husband's garments, assembling them with old napkins and tablecloths into collages that became a sort of diary. The collection also featured collaged pieces that maybe referenced these works.
One interesting point to make is that Bourgeois went from tapestry to the cutting edge of modern art, reuniting in her figure and her practice different times and combining together Medieval and Renaissance moods with cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism.
Simone Rocha did more or less the same in this collection: the show took place in the Guildhall Library and the collection went from history (William Morris tapestry, Victorian and conservative black...) to cutting edge modernism (Comme des Garçons shapes).
"I have endeavoured during my whole lifetime as a sculptor to turn woman from an object into an active subject," Bourgeois once stated and maybe Rocha's final intent with this collection was the same.
A final note for Louise Bourgeois' fans: the exhbition at the Moderna Museet will be on until 17th May 2015; it will then tour to Museo Picasso Málaga, in Spain (15th June - 27th September 2015), but if you want to rediscover Bourgeois you can also do so via the illustrated catalogue of the event that includes an interview based on conversations between Louise Bourgeois and Christiane Meyer-Thoss in New York in the 1980s.
Image credits for this post
1. Mathias Johansson
Louise Bourgeois N.Y.C., 1998
© Mathias Johansson
2. Louise Bourgeois
Maman, 1999
© The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS. Photo: Andrea Stappert
3. Louise Bourgeois
The Couple, 2003
© Collection The Easton Foundation Photo: Christopher Burke, ©The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS 2015
4. Louise Bourgeois
10 AM is when you come to me (detail), 2006
© The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS. Photo: Christopher Burke
5. Louise Bourgeois
Together, 2005
© The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS. Photo: Christopher Burke
6. Louise Bourgeois
Untitled, 2004
© The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS. Photo: Christopher Burke. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read
7. Louise Bourgeois
The Birth, 2007
© Collection The Easton Foundation Photo: Christopher Burke, ©The Easton Foundation / Licensed by BUS 2015
17. Louise Bourgeois
Mamelles, 1991
Pigmented urethane rubber, wall relief, 48.3 x 304.8 x 48.3 cm.
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lee Stalsworth
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments