Guaranty of Sanity

Louise Bourgeois surrounds herself in an enigma of drama and intrigue. Filled with violence, anger, shame, guilt, and pain, she creates work that is architectural, anthropomorphic, soft, and abject. Whether in bronze, iron, glass, or wood, both her art and sculptural language “is a Guaranty of Sanity.” A full-career retrospective of Bourgeois was on view at the Guggenheim Museum earlier in September. With forms manipulative and inspiring, 150 works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations with a provocative title such as Cells were on view. It is an exhibition that excitedly engaged the viewer, especially with Bourgeois’ confrontational signature motif, the spiral. Bourgeois was born in France in 1911 of parents who worked in tapestry.

Harriet Zinnes

Louise Bourgeois, Red Room (Child), 1994. Mixed media, 83 x 139 x 108 inches; 210.8 x 353 x 274.3 cm. Collection Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal. Photo credit: Marcus Schneider. Courtesy of Louise Bourgeois.

Louise Bourgeois surrounds herself in an enigma of drama and intrigue. Filled with violence, anger, shame, guilt, and pain, she creates work that is architectural, anthropomorphic, soft, and abject. Whether in bronze, iron, glass, or wood, both her art and sculptural language “is a Guaranty of Sanity.”

A full-career retrospective of Bourgeois was on view at the Guggenheim Museum earlier in September. With forms manipulative and inspiring, 150 works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations with a provocative title such as Cells were on view. It is an exhibition that excitedly engaged the viewer, especially with Bourgeois’ confrontational signature motif, the spiral.

Bourgeois was born in France in 1911 of parents who worked in tapestry. Raised in provincial France, the artist came to the United States following her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater in l938. Her husband was a member of the art and intellectual elite of New York, and the artist herself was close to such younger notable artists as Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Yet her work did not follow the abstract emphasis of such artists. More figurative, absorbing architectural and domestic images, and with an uncanny interest in the human body (often employing sets of genital metaphors), her work has a certain kinship with Cubism and Surrealism. Maybe her genital metaphors are too obviously influenced by such works as Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs in l935?

Certainly her work embraces burgeoning body parts, breast, and uterine cavities. As a catalogue from her retrospective informs us, through the enlightening essays here by well-known art critics such as Donald Kuspit, Robert Storr, and Linda Nochlin, sculpture as bodily fragments dates from antiquity, but the artist herself has found her own sources even older—out of the caves of prehistory.