Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

A woman is a house. At least, this woman is a house. She stands on two human legs, on what looks like a wooden platform that finishes abruptly into the void of the page. She’s naked. But from the waist upwards, she is a house. The house has stairs leading to its main door, and is supported by arches (it could be said that the door and two inverse arches make up a face). It has four levels with an irregular number of windows on each. One side of this house is visible, and it only has one small, circular window. Two arms poke out; the right one is waving, stunted into a perfect curve. This woman-house is one of the first Femmes Maisons Louise Bourgeois ever created, between 1946 and 1947. She would go on to print and re-edit it decades later. For Bourgeois, bodies and architecture are both recurring, obsessive themes, and the Femme Maison (woman-house, but also house-wife) unites the two. She eventually made them in all sorts of materials: cloth, marble, a doll, mud.

The Femmes Maisons are a clear example of how Bourgeois used autobiographical details to reach universal concerns. In these figures, we can recognise the embodiment of basic human fears: invisibility, loneliness, violence, anxiety. More complex ones, too, such as an ambiguous relationship with domesticity: is it happiness, or is it a trap? Is this figure happily stuck, and waving from a place of safety, or caught, vulnerable and limited by the circumstances? A particular skill of Bourgeois’s was to make evident the permeability between inside and outside. Often, both appear to be visible, as in the Femmes Maisons: are we seeing a character’s appearance, or her psyche?

Born in France in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in her parents’ tapestry repair workshop and gallery, soon becoming their draughtswoman. Her father fought in the First World War, and although he survived, he came back changed. Bourgeois’s work is rooted in what she called a betrayal: her father hired an English nanny and soon started a decade-long affair. The affective displacement (the father and the nanny were meant to love her, not each other) and the way her beloved mother turned a blind eye to the situation while they all shared a household, impacted Bourgeois enormously. By 1938, after studies in philosophy and mathematics, Bourgeois met and quickly married a North American art historian, Robert Goldwater. Using the marriage as an escape, they left for New York that same year. This is when Bourgeois truly began her career: abroad, as a young wife and mother, in an imposing city with an art scene that would take decades to crack.

Newly arrived, Bourgeois signed up to the Art Students League of New York, where she focused on creating prints: lithographs, to be exact. These early works are small, easy to execute, and heavily influenced by her daily life and environment. They are mostly interiors: dramatic, dark, with exaggerated lighting, with characters that seem alienated from each other. The artist described these pieces as ‘a mood of despair’ and ‘waiting and listening. It is as if a metronome is ticking’. One of her earliest lithographs, Escalier de 63 (1939), is named after Bourgeois’s address. In it, a woman (who looks very much like the artist) climbs a flight of stairs while neighbours, crowding the landing beneath, dumbly stare up at her.The narrow interior reads more psychological than architectural. Bourgeois would often return to what is already beginning to show in these multiples: buildings, her body, its changes (particularly through pregnancy), the people who surrounded her and those she left behind, the complex tangles tying it all together.

There is a picture from a few years later where she stands up straight, somewhat awkwardly, in a black pinafore dress, hands held in loose fists against her hip bones, face caught in a grimace, eyes partly shut, smile not quite full. She is on the rooftop of her apartment building, an enormous, cloudless sky hugs her, the elaborate cornice of a neighbouring building peeks mid-ground, scattered edifices further behind. Beside her are a bunch of totem-like wooden objects, a full head or two taller than her. These are some of her earliest Personage sculptures, a series of figures made as proxies for specific people. This image marks a significant moment: Bourgeois had by then jumped to three-dimensional work. Although she would continue to pursue two-dimensional practices such as drawing, printing or embroidery, the architectural references began to push for spatial installations. 

In the 1940s, Bourgeois worked on more Personages, and went on to exhibit them in solo and group shows. The bond between the body and the built environment was by then undeniable. Take Portrait of Jean-Louis (1947–49), a child version of her Femmes Maisons. Named after one of her sons, it’s a white skyscraper punctuated by bright blue windows, a door-navel and two sprouts for legs. The body/architecture theme continued in printing. In He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, a book from the same period, anthropomorphic buildings and interiors (a clock tower, the Woolworth Building, a Louisiana leprosarium) illustrate cryptic parables she wrote: ‘Once a man was waving to his / friend from the elevator. / He was laughing so much that / he stuck his head out and the ceil- / ing cut it off’. 

‘To be in the work’s presence is to confront the emotional detritus of being human’ 

In the 1960s she spent time in Italy working with marble, and also introduced softer materials to her increasingly diverse practice, like latex, rope and plaster. During this period, she developed the first of her Lairs, originally conceived as gourd-like shapes, complex nests full of entries and exits that were to be hung from the ceiling. These are effectively places, as they invite dwelling, if not literal, then emotional. An alternative to other, more common forms of positioning (on the floor, on the wall, on a plinth), they are escapist, an animal fantasy, unaesthetic (and badly received by critics at the time because of it), but still, protective. As always, there is tension between rest and entanglement, homeliness and the eerie.

In fact, she did get to inhabit something quite like them: at the end of the decade, she made wearable, bulbous costumes, like Avenza (1968–69). But it wasn’t until 1978 that all these interests and experiments would come together. That year, she produced another installation: Confrontation. The extraordinary turn was that, for the first time, Confrontation was a space that could be entered. She activated it through performance, where collaborators would wear latex pieces. This way, they would become something other than the Femmes Maisons, but still merged occupant and the occupiable; body and volume. The body turned object, and the object performed through the body’s movements.

Confrontation also seems to contain the seed for a rather different lair: Articulated Lair (1986). Here, a space delimited by panels features an entry and an exit, several drooping black shapes hanging inside, and a lonesome black stool. This piece, practically a room, is the gateway to Bourgeois’s most celebrated series: the Cells. What Bourgeois seemed to have been working towards was about to take its most complex shape. 

The Cells are monumental, made possible only by Bourgeois starting to work in a larger studio. They are very much the interiors of the Femmes Maisons, switching from being bodies to being scaled to contain a human body. These 60 installations are spatial self-portraits, environments that embody Bourgeois’s psyche and lived experiences.As the artist said herself, ‘I wanted to create my own architecture.’ Their name is of course completely intentional: Bourgeois described herself as a prisoner of her emotions.Their structure supports that statement: each Cell (typically a metallic mesh or wooden structure) is an enclosed assemblage that locks together made and found (or rather lived-through) objects.

Their intimacy implies violence; both in their enclosure, and in the materialisation of whatever lurks in the subconscious. Bourgeois was well versed in psychoanalysis. These pieces are not only autobiographical, but build a theory of being Bourgeois; they reference not only her memories but the theory and analysis that digested them. Confronting a Cell is a voyeuristic experience that eventually turns inwards: they force the beholder to imagine their own interiority. To be in their presence is to confront the emotional detritus of being human. 

There are reiterations of Bourgeois’s painstakingly composed personal vocabulary: headless bodies, textual embroideries, marble sculptures, hanging forms, floating spheres, oversized rotating mirrors. These items are often juxtaposed to objects sourced directly from Bourgeois’s life. We find dresses that once belonged to her, or to her mother, haunting the space, in Cell (Clothes) (1996). Or, in Cell II (1991), empty bottles of Shalimar, a classic Parisian, powdery-citrusy-sweet perfume worn by both women; an act of accumulated time (how many spritzes fit in each bottle?), and a seance of sorts; a loved one’s smell being capable of invoking their presence. The homes she has known are reimagined, too. In two Cells from 1997 we find torn tapestries like those of her childhood in Spider; or hordes of vintage furniture in the huge Passage Dangereux. The last Cell she ever made, Cell (The Last Climb) (2008), displays the spiral staircase of her old studio, leading upwards, uncertain, maybe, or knowing that time is nearly up.

With these pieces, Bourgeois finally found the recognition she had been craving (and deserving) since she first landed in New York. Following a retrospective at MoMA in 1982, and her work on the Cells, she caught the attention of other large institutions. She represented the US in the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993; and in 2000 the Tate Modern chose her as the inaugural artist for their Turbine Hall. In 2007, a complete retrospective toured the world, from the Tate, to the Centre Pompidou, to the New York Guggenheim, to name a few. 

Many of her final works are of a more manageable size, like those early lithographs: prints, drawings, embroideries, small items in paper and cloth. One of the very last series she ever made, in 2010, the year she died, is I Give Everything Away. These six etchings mix illustrations (coloured with a childlike energy, with a finish resembling wax crayons), with pencilled-in texts. Although this series is visually rather different to He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, the two are structurally related. In these final pieces, the body and the house are still present, especially in the texts, which declare ‘I distance myself from myself’, ‘I leave the nest’, or poignantly, ‘I leave my home’.

That was always her point: a body is a home. Bourgeois never ceased to make evident the many links between interior and interiority, structure and dwelling, embodiment and architecture, psyche and physicality. The resulting body of work is not only extraordinary in how plentiful it is, and in its array of media; but in how it builds up, never shying away from complexity. Bourgeois’s constructions are places to dwell on the full spectrum of what it is to be human. As she wrote, ‘I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.’