The sculptor Louise Bourgeois just turned ninety, but she still works six days a week. On Sunday she rests, because that’s her assistant’s day off. This leaves her at loose ends, however, so for the past thirty years she has held a Sunday salon in her brownstone on West Twentieth Street. The attendees are mostly young artists, who have come to show her their work. Last spring, I went to one of these gatherings. There were fourteen visitors, who sat in hard chairs in a small, peeling parlor. Once we had all signed release forms—to compound everyone’s nervousness, the salons are videotaped—Bourgeois materialized in the doorway, a tiny woman in a pink blouse, black culottes, and black sneakers. Her hair was brushed back elegantly, and she wore gold hoop earrings. The art critic Paulo Herkenhoff helped her into a chair behind a table facing us, and from there, atop a wooden box and a pillow, to raise her high enough for us to see her, she presided for the next four and a half hours.
Bourgeois is not a dear old lady. With Herkenhoff’s help, she drew each artist into a discussion of what he or she was doing. Usually she made an encouraging comment, but not always. One artist showed her a series of Keith Haring-esque drawings he had made. “But it is silly, faux-naïf,” she said. The man tried to explain. Finally, Herkenhoff asked her if she wanted to see more from this portfolio. “No,” she answered. “I am through, I am through.” People have been known to exit Bourgeois’s salon in tears, but if you can take it the dynamics are interesting. The critic Amei Wallach has described a session in which Bourgeois, while modelling a piece of clay, talked about the difference between painting and sculpture:
Then she wrung the neck of the figure she was creating.
Bourgeois is one of the few surviving artists of the early modernist period. By rights she should be thinking about mass or space or something like that. In any case, she should have been spared the violent catharsis, the discharge of terror and wrath, being enacted by female artists today. But this drama is a daily event for her. She has crushing anxiety attacks. “That happens to me four times a day,” she has written. And it has been happening for as long as she can remember.
Fear is the main theme of her work, but anger is a close second. “I have fantastic pleasure in breaking everything,” she has said. Once, in an interview, she threw a ceramic vase onto the floor and stomped on its fragments. But mostly the violence is in the work. In one celebrated piece, a six-foot marble statue called “She-Fox” (1985), the animal has been decapitated, and there is a big gash in its throat. At the base of the statue, huddling behind the animal’s haunches, is a tiny female figure. Bourgeois has explained that the she-fox is her mother and the little supplicant is herself: “I cut her head off. I slit her throat. Still, I expect her to like me.”
Bourgeois has not failed to notice that her psychological difficulties may have something to do with her sex. “Women are losers,” she has said. “They are beggars, in spite of women’s lib.” She has protested this fate. Probably her best-known sculpture, because Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her holding it, is “Fillette” (1968), a latex figure of what is unavoidably an erect penis, about two feet long, with a pair of testicles to scale. Bourgeois recalls that when Mapplethorpe asked to photograph her she was afraid; she knew that his work was about men, with big penises. So she brought her penis, “Fillette,” carrying it jauntily under her arm, like an Hermès handbag. She says she feels kindly toward the male reproductive anatomy, as well she might, since she had three sons. “Fillette” is not a compliment to the male sex, however. Its very size is comical. Furthermore, its surface looks corroded, as if it were rotting.
Bourgeois was born in 1911, her parents’ third child, and third daughter. As she has said, this was a problem:
The word her mother used for “little girl” was probably fillette. Hence, I believe, the title of Bourgeois’s mock-compensatory penis.
Two years after Louise’s birth, her mother finally produced a son, but by then Louise was already her father’s favorite—which, as she tells it, meant that he dominated her relentlessly, in order to bring her up to snuff. Her feelings about that, or some of them, can be read in a large latex-and-plaster piece, a grisly assemblage of bumps and lumps, together with assorted body parts—chicken legs, lamb shoulders—called “The Destruction of the Father” (1974). Bourgeois has described the fantasy underlying the piece:
She hated him, and she loved him like crazy. When he died, in 1951, she stopped showing any new work for eleven years.
So Bourgeois, this bold modernist sculptor, a contemporary of Henry Moore and David Smith, has all the same female troubles that the women who go on “Oprah” have. Worse, she claims that she became an artist simply in order to cope with such problems. Her art, she has written, is a form of therapy, a way of preventing herself from going out and killing someone, or herself. The audience is “bullshit, unnecessary.” Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant of twenty years, confirms this. According to him, on any given morning, “she’s not sitting down to make art. She’s trying to get through the day, and the art is the by-product.” Her art, he says, is “about what went wrong.”
What went wrong? Bourgeois’s parents were prosperous French artisans, restorers of antique tapestries. Her father travelled, hunting up the old textiles, and ran a gallery in Paris where the family sold them. Bourgeois’s mother, with a staff of about twenty-five women, repaired the tapestries. Many collectors were American, so the scenes could not be unchaste. Bourgeois has recalled how her mother “would cut out the genitalia, very delicately, with little scissors, and collect them.” (Another source of “Fillette”?) The resulting gaps had to be sewn over, as did the sections of the tapestry that had disintegrated. To redraw missing parts, the firm employed a certain M. Gounod, from the Gobelin works, who came on Saturdays. But sometimes M. Gounod didn’t turn up. When Bourgeois was ten, she was put to work to cover for him, and so she learned to draw.
She didn’t intend to be an artist. Her passions were mathematics and philosophy. That is what she studied at the Sorbonne, after twelve years at Paris’s Lycée Fénelon. Best of all, she liked solid geometry, a field, she has said, “where relations can be anticipated and are eternal.” Mathematics, she says, never betrayed you. Eventually, however, she discovered that mathematics offered no certainties either: “You’re told that two parallels never meet, and then you learn that in non-Euclidean geometry they can easily come together. I was deeply disappointed, and turned toward the certainties of feeling.” That is, she turned to art. She spent her early twenties running from studio to studio in Paris, to study with different teachers. The one she liked best was Léger, who told her that she was a sculptor, not a painter. To pay for her art lessons—her father refused to help—she did various odd jobs. In Léger’s studio she earned her way via translation services. Her English was very good, because she and her brother had had an English nanny.
In 1936, she met an American art-history student, Robert Goldwater, and two years later she married him. Not surprisingly—two of her sons are still alive—Bourgeois has said much more about her childhood than about her adulthood, and on the subject of her marriage she has been notably silent. But from her rare, sidelong remarks about Goldwater it seems that she liked him for the same reason that she had liked mathematics: he “was a completely rational person. . . . He did not betray me. He did not betray anyone. I never saw him angry in my life. Ever.” Goldwater became an important art historian. He was interested in nothing but ideas, she says, with the result that “each of us remained forever, forever, mysterious to the other.” But she told me that she was always grateful to him: “I was a runaway girl, and Robert saved me.” (Everything Bourgeois “told me” was said in writing. She rarely gives interviews these days. I was allowed to submit a list of questions—Nabokov’s system—and she answered them by E-mail.)
Goldwater moved her to New York, and she loved the city. She missed home, though, and, like a good, guilty female, she felt she had abandoned her family. In her first solo sculpture show, in 1949, she exhibited two rooms full of slim, pole-like figures—some bronze, some wood—one with wings, one with nails driven into it, and so on. She called them “Personages,” and they looked like people, whispering to one another across the space of the gallery. Soon after that show, her father died. She went on making uprights, but now they were wild, spiralling things. It was at this time that she dropped from public view, though she did not stop working. Eventually she began using latex and plaster, creating large, gluey-looking objects that resembled mouths or genitals or the interiors they led to. In “Le Regard” (“The Gaze”) one peered inside a sort of giant, messy clam and saw, between folds of material, a small, round, wet-looking thing. This is an embarrassing piece. We feel we shouldn’t be looking.
In her early work, Bourgeois anticipated much that others would do later: installations, minimalism, body art. She did not get a lot of attention, however. This was partly her fault—at times she seemed to flee attention—but it was also owing to the boys’-club atmosphere of the postwar American art world, the world of the Abstract Expressionists, with their emphasis on virility, “action,” abstraction. In comparison, her work, however abstract, seemed narrative, soft.
It was only with the challenge to modernism which arose in the sixties and seventies that people started to notice her. Most crucial was the feminist challenge. Why did art have to be abstract? the feminists asked. Why wasn’t it about the real story, about people’s lives and emotions? Like many older female artists, women who had made it in a man’s world and were proud of that, Bourgeois had mixed feelings about feminism. Her biographer Robert Storr, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art, says that she associates feminism with victimization. Nevertheless, it was the newly energized female critics and curators of the sixties and seventies who, unafraid of rotting penises and peekaboo clams, paid her the respect she had not received before. In 1966, the art critic Lucy Lippard included her in a famous show, “Eccentric Abstraction,” that was a harbinger of postmodernism. There she stood, alongside artists such as Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse, and though she was old enough to be their mother, she looked as young and crazy as they did.
In the late sixties, she went to Italy and began making large marble figures. The work was still abstract, but it was “symbolic abstraction” (her term), and what it symbolized was often clear. Her 1967 “Sleep II,” for example, was a great stone totem worthy of the Toltecs. At the same time, it looked a lot like the head of a penis. In 1973, Goldwater died, and, as sometimes happens with women artists when they are widowed, she did not wither; she flowered. “The Destruction of the Father” was made the following year. I have wondered whether it might not have to do with Goldwater as well as with her father.
Now the world caught up with her. She was given cover stories, honorary degrees, commissions for public works. In 1982, at the urging of a young female curator, Deborah Wye, Bourgeois was accorded a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first large retrospective that the institution had ever devoted to a woman. At the age of seventy, she became world famous.
On the occasion of the retrospective, Bourgeois did something that has affected her career ever since. Before, no matter how unbuttoned her work, she tended to give reticent interviews. In 1969, when the MOMA curator William Rubin asked her about “Sleep II,” she replied, “I am not particularly aware or interested in the erotic of my work, in spite of its supposed presence.” To a journalist who dared to ask her about the “Personages,” she responded, “Do you want me to talk about my personal life? . . . I don’t like to do that.”
Then, with the MOMA retrospective, the lid blew off. In putting together an autobiographical slide show to accompany that exhibition—and a photo essay, based on the slide show, that was published in Artforum—she told a story she had never gone public with before. Her English governess, it turned out, had had other duties besides teaching the children. Sadie Gordon Richmond, who seems to have been in her late teens when she moved into the Bourgeois household, was Louis Bourgeois’s live-in mistress—an arrangement that his wife tolerated for ten years. The Artforum piece presented charming snapshots of the Bourgeois ménage—Louise and Sadie boating, Louise and Papa hiking—accompanied by a cold, angry text. Sadie, Bourgeois wrote, “was engaged to teach me English. I thought she was going to like me. Instead of which she betrayed me.” Her mother, too, betrayed her, used her as a pawn, a duenna for Sadie and the father. As for the father, one of the photos shows “Fillette,” the disembodied penis, looming over a flight of stairs, presumably the stairs to Sadie’s bedroom. Bourgeois has described the Sadie business as formative to her work: “The motivation for the work is a negative reaction against her.” Or, as she put it in the photo essay, “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor.” Though she may have deplored the feminists’ claims of victimization, here she took a page out of their book. The title of the photo essay was “Child Abuse.”
If Bourgeois, earlier, had been almost perversely tight-lipped, now she became almost perversely confessional. She published her diaries, offering us, for example, a childhood memory of seeing her older sister Henriette making love with the boy from across the street. (There was blood all over. She didn’t know that Henriette had her period—she thought the boy was killing her.) When journalists asked her polite questions about form and technique, she countered with statements about life and grief. “Presumably the dangling leg relates to a difficulty in articulation,” an interviewer commented about one piece, in 1988. “It is about the control of pain,” she replied. “This is turning into a private conversation,” he said at one juncture. “I don’t mind,” she answered. Standing in front of her work, she would give interviewers point-for-point explications: “The three hands are a metaphor for psychological dependency,” “The transparent glass represents a sickness,” etc.
In the past two decades, Bourgeois’s reputation has grown and grown. In 1992, the Guggenheim inaugurated its new SoHo branch with a show entitled “From Brancusi to Bourgeois.” The next year, Bourgeois was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. When the Tate Modern opened in London, in 2000, its first exhibition was by Bourgeois. This past summer, a trio of her monumental spider sculptures was displayed in Rockefeller Plaza. Then the biggest of the spiders was shipped off to Russia and installed in front of the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, where Bourgeois was given a three-month retrospective. Some people I have spoken to feel that Bourgeois, as a female artist long neglected by a male-dominated art world, and a woman with an abuse story to tell, fit a little too neatly with the politics of the eighties and nineties for us to believe that her rise to fame was due to artistic considerations alone. This is certainly true. Bourgeois made a good story. People enjoy reading about “dysfunctional families,” and if the dysfunction is posited as explanatory—which in Bourgeois’s case it sometimes was—so much the better. Modern art is hard to explain.
Actually, Bourgeois’s childhood difficulties tell us very little. The more she talks about her traumas and fears, the less we seem to understand her bold, unfrightened work. On some of her sculptures she has inscribed a text, such as “Do you love me?” or “Do not abandon me.” These are the pieces I understand the least, because the words get in the way. The same is true of the Sadie story. As Robert Storr has protested, it has become a kind of creation myth for her work, restricting interpretations to “narrowly personal or archetypally Freudian sources.” Bourgeois’s closet contains other things besides skeletons. She had a solid lycée education, and she knows the history of Western art cold. She is not just a suffering female but a French classicist. In “Sleep II” the dome of the Pantheon figures as strongly as the male genitals, and if it didn’t the piece wouldn’t be half as interesting.
It is unlikely that Bourgeois used her childhood memories to jack up her reputation. She is the furthest thing from a publicity hound. Since the mid-nineties, she has not even attended her own openings. As for interviews, she gave them for years, but she clearly feared them, and her latter-day confessionalism, like her earlier reticence, may well have been a shield against that fear. “I tell stories to keep questions at bay,” she has said. Recently, at a panel on Bourgeois at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York, I asked why she bothered, so late, to come out with the abuse story. The artist Kiki Smith said she thought that, in telling that story, Bourgeois was not so much explaining her work as putting on a sort of drama, however factual. The editor and curator Louise Neri said the same: the story was a form of “personal theatre.” Many public figures come up with a persona that they show to the world. This helps them preserve their privacy. But it can also foster a certain fetishism, and that has happened with Bourgeois. People who don’t know her refer to her as Louise. She is often treated as a character, the art world’s favorite naughty old lady. She has colluded in this. At her most recent show, her voice, croakily singing French children’s songs—“Frère Jacques” and others—was piped into one of the rooms.
But that is play, or public relations. It is not art, and Bourgeois’s art deserves its fame. After the MOMA show, she burst into a new period, creating what she has called “cells.” These are installations, the size of small rooms, in which she assembles various objects that tell a kind of story. In “Cell (Choisy)” we see a replica of one of her childhood homes—it was in the town of Choisy-le-Roi—exquisitely carved in pink marble. Hanging over it is a huge guillotine blade. With the cells, as with other pieces, Bourgeois has obligingly filled in the “facts.” ("The big coat is a metaphor for the unconscious.”) Again, however, her explanations seem inadequate, even intrusive. We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind.
In recent years, Bourgeois has tired of autobiography. When Storr, in a 1994 interview, put to her a question about her past, she replied, “I’m not interested in that anymore.” When he asked her whether the antagonism in her work was in some measure sexual, she answered, “I wouldn’t admit that, but you can always propose it.” This was more than a decade after she had told everyone within shouting distance that the engine of her art was anger over her governess’s affair with her father. Never mind. As she wrote in 1988, in an essay on her piece “The Sail,” the work speaks for itself: “Whatever the artist says about it is like an apology, it is not necessary.” (Then she went on to discuss the motivations behind “The Sail” for four pages.)
Today Bourgeois is less concerned with anger than with repair. This is an important subject for her, because it is what her mother did for a living, and also because there are things in her life that she would like to repair. This winter, she had a show in New York which featured a roomful of large rag dolls, hanging from the ceiling and copulating. This image goes back not just to her father and Sadie but to Henriette with the boy from across the street. But whereas Bourgeois’s earlier representations of that scene were disturbing—the female figure wore a leg brace (Henriette had water on the knee)—these couples were allowed to go about their business unharmed. They were a strange sight, both toylike and grave, tender and lurid. (The male genitals were sewn on, tiny and precise.) The stitch marks running up and down their bodies made them more strange. Their skin had been pierced; we felt it. At the same time, the stitching seemed restorative. Bourgeois was bringing them together, letting them live.
The same ambivalence can be seen in the series of bronze and steel spiders that Bourgeois has been making since the early nineties—for example, the thirty-foot-tall spider that now stands in front of the Hermitage. The figure is frightening, and when you find out its name—“Maman” (“Mommy”)—it is more frightening. Bourgeois told me that the spider is a positive metaphor. It is a weaver, and her mother was a weaver: “She always protected me. She was my best friend. She was a monument to me.” Nevertheless, there is something peculiar going on here. Remember that in “Child Abuse” the mother also betrayed the child. And consider Bourgeois’s poem “Ode to My Mother”:
The mother’s lies, the child’s desperation—and that’s not the end of it. Bourgeois’s giant spider is not just dangerous; she is endangered. “Maman” has an egg sac, full of white marble eggs, hanging from her nether parts, and the sac has a big dent in it, as if it had been violently punched. Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at “Maman” in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. ♦
