The Quest for Containment and Assertion in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

There is a photograph of the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in what appears to be a joyful emotional state, holding above her head a smaller version of one of her iconic spiders; Bougeois’ stance and expression convey a sense of triumph, as if to say, “I can master the danger within and outside of myself.” The art and psychoanalytic worlds are very fortunate to have so much information about her; since she was a girl, Bourgeois kept notes and diaries about her memories, thoughts, and feelings. She would use past and current writings to “exorcise” painful memories as she made her paintings and, most of all, her sculptures. As Louise Bourgeois reached her 80s and 90s, she exposed more about herself in interviews with people whom she trusted, such as Donald Kuspit, the well-known art critic (Kuspit, An Interview with Louise Bourgeois, 1988).

Influenced by the Old Masters that were part of her education, by the mythical figures in the tapestries that she helped her parents restore, by the art movements of her day such as Cubism, particularly by Ferdinand Legere, by innovative architecture, and by her husband’s interest in African art, Louise Bourgeois experimented with different materials and form, to reflect her pressing concerns and her own and humanity’s struggles. As an older woman, she told Kuspit that she preferred working in marble because it was the most resistant material. She stated that she thought her liking of marble’s resistance was that she herself felt “unlovable.” In other words, she had to fight to get something; it was just not given to her.

Louise Bourgeois was the third girl born to her parents (though one of the girls died in infancy). Louise’s father had wanted a boy and made that known. Therefore, she felt unwanted, not valued, and was often demeaned by him. In the most recent autobiographical movie called The Spider, The Mistress, The Tangerine and Myself (2008), Bourgeois recounts that one evening at the dinner table, which was the site of her father’s self-aggrandizing

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stories and humiliation of other family members, he told Louise that she was like the inside of a tangerine after the pulp had been removed. No doubt this statement was a reference to the absence of a penis in her, which was humiliating enough, but also could resonate in her mind as her being nothing, having no self or identity. The pain of this memory obviously never left Bourgeois, as it is both in the title and discussed in the movie It is therefore no surprise that many of Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures are phallic-like projections and protuberances as if to assert her presence and power.

Bourgeois had an enormous retrospective of her work at the Tate Gallery in London in 2007. For the catalogue and book that was published as an outgrowth of this exhibition, Bourgeois contributed a glossary, where she gave her verbal associations to the various letters of the alphabet. For the letter “A” she wrote: “Abandonment; I want revenge for having been born; I want apologies for what was done to me. To be born is to be ejected. To be abandoned, from there comes the fury.” As she explains later in the book, a great deal of her fury comes from her father’s affair with her governess. She rightly lashes out angry feelings about this kind of betrayal right under her nose by all the adults in the household, including her mother, who put up with it.

It is likely that much of Bourgeois’ childhood pain bubbled up in her as she went through her roles of wife and mother. She married an American art historian, Robert Goldwater, and moved to New York City to be with him; they had three children. Before her marriage, in France and after studying art, Bourgeois operated her own art gallery in Paris. Initially after her marriage, Bourgeois was involved in the rearing of her sons and meeting many influential people in the art world, mainly due to her husband’s career. During this period, Bourgeois reports suffering from insomnia and fortuitously discovering the therapeutic aspects of drawing, no doubt a needed expression of her conflicts and struggles.

It was in the late 1940s and early 1950s that Bourgeois turned mainly towards sculpture as her means of expression. However, she began with the paintings called Femme Maison, which later became sculptures to reflect the struggles of the woman. Some of both the sculptures and the paintings show a nude woman

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with a house covering her head and neck with a feather-like form coming out of the top of the house. It is likely that the house covering the woman’s head communicates the sense that the woman has no other identity than the duties of the household; she is not individuated and is weighed down by the household responsibilities. The feather might be a bit of irony that the household is a feather in the woman’s cap. Femme Maison was a theme in Bourgeois’ sculpture until close to the end. Though not an avowed feminist, she was attuned to the struggles of women, primarily in identification with her mother, who had to keep family and business in tow. Bourgeois did not receive much recognition until she was in her 70s.

Bourgeois would say the success in art was not in the final product or the recognition. It was in the process of creation and the strength obtained after working on a piece. Perusing her art and her comments, it appears that her creative products are like a good psychoanalysis, where the patient recognizes repressed and traumatic feelings and overcomes them with insight. Freud said success in analysis involves “where id was, ego shall be.” For Bourgeois, one could say, “where id was, sculpture would be,” as she transformed pain and gained insight visually and muscularly. For example, there is a sculpture that she made when she was in her late 30s called The Blind Leading the Blind. She said that the making of this sculpture was triggered by the memory of her and her brother under the kitchen table, when they were quite small, as their parents were making lunch. She recalls feeling quite frightened, small, and vulnerable, not knowing “what my place was in the family.” Her younger brother was behind her and she felt as if she had to lead him somewhere. Though feeling vulnerable is endemic to childhood, one wonders if the household atmosphere—with the father’s explosiveness and affairs—led to feeling fear of obliteration more intensely. The sculpture is a series of what looks like table legs five-feet high stretching across about five feet. The height of the legs gives an idea of how small Bourgeois felt as a child in relation to the adult world. When Bourgeois was in her 60s, she made a sculpture of latex, plastic, and mixed media that she entitled Destruction of the Father. Here we can surmise that the artist is turning from passive (as fear was expressed in The Blind Leading the

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Blind) to active, as Anna Freud described some of the child’s defenses, particularly identification with the aggressor. Bourgeois says that the latter sculpture was based on her memory of the fantasy she had as a child at the dinner table of her and her brother dismembering the father and eating him. The aggressive, cannibalistic aspects of this fantasy appear incorporated in the sculpture itself. The material looks somewhat like flesh, with part of it having small, sharp-looking projections that appear like teeth. Bourgeois was very versatile and experimental, and erected room installations which she indicated held certain memories, some of them being dark and foreboding, and other rooms in richer reds, suggesting more sensuous states.

This brief look at some of Bourgeois’ work and context of inspiration hopefully illustrates the artist’s daring in plumbing the depths of her emotional experience and memories, while at the same time expressing its importance and universal value.

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