Louise Bourgeois: The Wicked Little Girl

In the first week of October 2007, I saw on BBC 1 - a very telling documentary on Louise Bourgeois – who at the age of 96 - was generally considered to be the greatest living female artist in the world. In her long career (as long as Picasso’s) Bourgeois had made: Cubist and Surreal oil paintings, Tribal-like wooden towers, marble phallic shaped abstractions, rubber phallus's and breasts, architectural spaces filed with menacing domestic props and symbolic sculptures, embroidered rants, tapestry masks (which cross 18th century French Tapestry design with African masks), giant steel female spiders (their belly's full of eggs), and countless heartfelt, uncanny and symbolic watercolours, drawings and prints. At the time of the documentary Bourgeois was the subject of a major retrospective in Tate Modern in London – it was an exhibition I ached to see – but simply could not get to.

           

However, having seen two exhibitions dedicated to her – the first in The Douglas Hyde Gallery and the second in IMMA - I totally agreed that she was the greatest female artist of my today. Nevertheless, when seen in a wider historical perspective – how good was she really?

           

There was no doubt that Bourgeois had been one of the most influential artists of the previous forty years - especially on female artists. A quick look at the work made by young sculptors from the 1970s onward – revealed just how much of a debt they owed her. You only had to look for example at Kiki Smith in America, Dorothy Cross in Ireland or Tracey Emin in England - not to mention male artists like Damien Hirst. In fact, Bourgeois was the Matriarch of ‘identity-art’ and it’s most complex and intelligent exponent. But Bourgeois did not enjoy this theft of her art – she believed people were robbing her images and ideas – she was right - but it was a bit rich coming from someone who had done the same for most of her life! Her art had an original flavour to it – but like all great art it had been built upon the lessons of art history.

           

Personally, I thought she was up there with the very best hundred and fifty known artists in Western art. There were only a few dozen men or women in the west - who sacrificed so much psychic energy to their art, fought such prejudices and customs and battled so very long for recognition (she was almost seventy-one before her first major retrospective in MoMA in 1982.) However, I thought her work had not reached beyond the third rank of importance – her concerns were too private, to parochial and too baffling to ever have the universal appeal of the likes of Raphael, Monet or Warhol. Moreover, she was far from the premier groundbreaking achievements of Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Duchamp or Dalí.

           

As a female artist – I thought she was the greatest of all time. I identified with her misandry - as a counter weight to my own misogyny. I doubted she would like me and I feared I would crumble in her terrifying presence – but I would still have been tempted to talk with her. I completely identified with her passive-aggressive anger and hostility - and I felt a kinship with her unbreakable creativity. I did not know what it was like to be a little girl afraid of her father and wanting to be a man. But I did know what it was like to be a little boy afraid of my mother and wanting to be a woman! I instinctively understood her fragmented icons, her torn words, her wounded ego, her tortured and Janus faced sexuality, and her inner battle of self. I greatly admired her intellect and sound knowledge of art history and found her captivating in interviews, take for example this great quote from her: “I want revenge for being born, I want apologies, I want blood, I want to do to others what has been done to me. To be born is to be ejected, to be abandoned – therein lies the fury.” I could not have put it better myself!

           

Bourgeois at her very best – was often revoltingly ugly – lodging panic into men and turning the stomach of many women. The nasty edge to her work put off traditional art lovers who much preferred the pure beauty and genteel femininity of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler or the ironic detachment of Cindy Sherman. Even Frida Kahlo’s paintings were more inviting to the viewer – for she often made pain look stylish and brave.

           

Of course notions of the Western Canon like this were both ignorant of other cultures and the anonymous work of thousands of craftsmen and women throughout time - who have fashioned masterpieces without the conceit that artists after Giotto in the West have been plagued by. Just one quick example of a hardly known great non-western female artist was Lei (sister of the devout Emperor Shun in China) - reputed to be the mother of Chinese painting – a fact much lamented by the men who came after her to take over this art form.

           

Typically in the West, the mediums and subjects of female art – embroidery, tapestries, flower arranging, still-life's or maternity scenes have been denigrated as inferior art forms – while their attempts to become painters and sculptors have been handicapped by hostility masked as morality. Many female artists were restricted to the role of happy amateurs painting at home. Others who tried to make a career for themselves were blocked from the life-class, often expected to stop making art once married and certainly after having children - and their subjects restricted to the domestic scene. Which was not to say that there had not been highly successful female artists in the Western tradition – just look at Angelica Kauffmann or Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun in the seventeenth century. However even in the 1940s an artist like Lee Krasner willingly put her own career on hold – to promote the work of her husband Jackson Pollock. Thus the handicraft of women in particular had been written out of history – and this unspoken injunction against female artists - is what Bourgeois attacked head on in her work. Like a demented child tearing apart a toy soldier - she sought to deconstruct the masculine edifice and replace it with a feminine presence. One of her key strategies being the use of needlepoint, stitching and embroidery to deliver witty and sarcastic observations on the human body.

           

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her father had wanted a boy. Bourgeois maybe wanted to be a boy herself – she certainly grew up resentful of male authority and the restricted ambitions and potential for little girls. She struck me in interviews as a kind of insane Katharine Hepburn type character – fiery, tempestuous, rebellious and wickedly funny – but with a very soft, tender and hurt hidden side.

           

According to Bourgeois – her father was a tyrant, quick to physically discipline, given to prolonged monologues and rants at the dinner table and worst of all betraying Louise’s mother by carrying on with the child’s live-in Governess. Worse still, her mother accepted this unofficial menage-a-trois – leaving Louise betrayed three times over.

           

Some cynics like Brian Sewell had asked whether her childhood warranted such an exhaustive, lengthy and repetitious exploration. So what if her father was a patriarchal philanderer – he provided her with a relatively stable home, Coco Channel dresses, trips to Cannes and paid for her expensive and privileged education. Personally, I thought it crass to question Bourgeois source of pain – maybe she had exaggerated it in her art, but that was one of the main functions of the artist – to magnify the everyday.

           

However perhaps the worst thing that Louise’s father did - was to be so very like herself. Since the 1970s Bourgeois had held a Salon - in her run down home (its rooms crammed with her work and it’s walls covered in her rants and cries of pain) in New York - with the art critic Robert Storr. At such gatherings, young artists came to show them their work - and she pressed them for the meaning of it all. “But why did you want to make that?” Seemed to be her most common question. Seeing her at her Salon I could not help wonder at the purpose and value of such sessions for those artists foolish enough to bring themselves to her. Perhaps if you were also an artist interested in auto-biographical art – they might have had some value – but to a formalist they would have be utterly useless. Fundamentally, I believed that for little Louise - who had been forced to sit and listen powerlessly to her father and other men like the Surrealist rant on – it was a chance to take to the head of the table in later life.

           

Her family was prosperous and her childhood was at least materially privileged. She grew up in a large elegant Paris house - which she was to later recreate in highly detailed scaled models - the most telling one (Cell (Choisy), 1990-1993) a large marble version in a cage with a guillotine perched over it – ready to slice it in half. Houses for Bourgeois - became cages for repression, betrayal, frustration, fear, longing and pain.                                                                                             

Her mother and father mended tapestries - so from any age Bourgeois worked with them learning the ancient skills of the loom. Some of the tapestries that they mended - contained nude nymphs and Goddesses – their owners felt embarrassed by the nudity in such works and requested that the genitals be covered up. So one of little Louise’s first jobs was to help her parents sew little bunches of grapes or fig leafs over the genitals! This crass desecration of art by ignorant philistines - probably lead to her rebellious construction of phallic and vulva sculptures in the late 1960s.

           

At the age of fifteen, she studied mathematics in the Sorbonne in Paris, and her grounding in geometry informed her early Cubist paintings. In her late twenties Bourgeois trained in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then worked in the studios of Bissiere and the great Cubist painter Fernand Leger. It was Leger who convinced her that her real talent lay in sculpture. He was right – she never had any real painterly gift – her paintings tend to be naïve, graphic, and linear – more interesting for their potential realization in the third dimension than for their brushwork, colour or painterly texture.

           

In the 1920s she hung around the Surrealists– but her hackles rose when they treated her as just another bit of skirt – according to her they were misogynistic men and the only women they cared for were either sluts or rich society women who would buy their art. When she said that Marcel Duchamp was like her father – it was not a compliment!

           

A year before the outbreak of World War Two - Bourgeois escaped to New York – with her new husband Robert Goldwater a reputable art historian and specialist on African art. She said he was more like her mother than her father – a real compliment in her book! Bourgeois intently fell in love with the American metropolis - she admired its scale, its ambition, its tolerance, its multi-culturalism and its greater freedom for women. I was also sure she chuckled at the gross phallic posturing of Manhattan's sky-scrappers.

           

No doubt, Goldwater and Bourgeois spent many a long hour talking about primitive art and its importance in Modern art. The out-standing biographer John Richardson in ‘Picasso a Life’ volume two (1997) described perfectly the Spaniards search for ‘the-sacred-fire’. Picasso found it in African art – which although technically brutal, simplistic and crude – exploded with psychic energy, feeling and Voodoo. I think Bourgeois found the same thing in Tribal art – but it took her decades to move beyond mere imitation of its form into a true expression of its feeling.

           

In 1949, she gave up painting and became a full time sculptor – she was thirty-eight. The fact is that Bourgeois was a late developer – her first sculptures in New York – her so called Skyscraper works were far too indebted to Brancusi, Picasso and Tribal art. She was still using other men's grammar and other men's forms. Despite the fact that MoMA bought one of her sculptures from her 1947 show – her work was ignored by the New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s. In an art market dominated by macho Abstract-Expressionism, cynical Pop art, over theorized Post-Painterly Abstraction, and pious Hard-Edged Abstraction – Bourgeois’ work looked retarded, ugly and the work of a crazy outsider.

           

Bourgeois created her first undoubted masterpiece Fillette (Little Girl) in 1968 while still largely ignored. Made of battered latex - it looks like a mangled and abused horse-sized dildo complete with balls. It is a truly ugly and compelling work – a misandristic assault on the male genitalia – made by a woman sick of sitting in silence, while men postured around her. However after a third or fourth look – one finds in it and other phallic images by her - a suppressed and surprising tenderness and tongue in cheek black humour. It is telling that she carried it under her arm like an umbrella at her triumphant MoMA show in 1982!

           

In my experience women are fascinated by penises and their responses range from; fear, disgust, contempt, hysteria, hilarity, affection, love - and uncontrollable lust. Bourgeois managed to punctuate her phallic objects with all these emotions – sometimes within a single piece. She also linked aspects of the phallus with elements of the female body – by turns making it look like a breast, a torso, an udder or some strange growth.

           

It was only in the early 1970s that her work began to gain wider influence amongst a new generation of artists and feminist concerned with issues Bourgeois had been exploring for decades – identity, the body, gender and patriarchal structures. Now I had repeatedly attacked the rise of Feminist historians and their hyping of mediocrities like Gwen John and Tamara de Lempicka – but we can at least be thankful that they discovered and promoted Bourgeois – though she herself remained a loner belonging to no school.

           

Her breakthrough into greatness coincided with the death of her father and her beloved Robert – which plunged her into a “fantastic depression” – her words and I think they are telling. She doubted that she had earned her new-found respect - and could not sleep at night. Joseph Beuys another truly great Shaman of the twentieth century had a similar breakthrough after a prolonged ‘fantastic’ depression. These were not depressions of collapse – they were depressions of liberation. It is strange to note that the Portuguese's Paula Rego – another great female artist (equally interested in the complexes of the family) should have also produced some of her greatest works since her husband’s death.

           

Like a woman with absolutely nothing to gain or lose – Bourgeois began to create her greatest masterpieces – redolent with isolation, sexual anger and autobiographical staging. Moreover, as her work hit its stride – her newfound finances, assistants and curatorial support gave her the freedom to create ever more complex, ambitious and vast constructions. The fact is that success in art breeds success – each sale helps fund the following more ambitious projects. I sense that Bourgeois had been waiting for this moment all her life – and she threw herself into it joyfully – like a patient who meets her Park Avenue therapist at a party and unburdens herself for five hours without spending a penny.

           

In the mid 1980s Bourgeois began making her ‘cells’ – semi-architectural spaces in which she installed ambiguous and menacing objects some found - some crafted. Edward Kienholz may have influenced her – but there was a Freudian and Symbolic overtone to her work that made it her own. Bourgeois by now had little interest in nature - apart from the meat of flesh and the animal fears of the family. Her work became increasingly autobiographical and drawn from painful memories of her childhood in France. Her work re-staged the most private and traumatic episodes of her life in such an unpalatable way that viewers often flinched away.

           

In 1993, she represented American at the Venice Biennale, and in 1999, she was the first artist to fill the vast Turbine hall in Tate Modern. Which she did with did with three vast observation towers that the viewer mounted via a curving stair at the top of which were seats winged by large parabolic mirrors. Adjacent to the towers and spanning the Turbine Bridge was huge thirty-five feet high Spider sculpture (Maman now outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) – looming over the viewer protectively or threateningly according to your view point. Of course, Bourgeois was only responsible for the drawing and planning of such vast sculptural works – assistants and foundries did most of the brute work – but unlike other artists of this approach – Bourgeois managed to infuse such ‘factory-made’ work with genuine magic.

           

I had seen her in interviews many times over the years and could not think seeing a more intimidating or sour looking woman in all my life (apart maybe from my mother when ill.) I was reminded of Kate Nash’s song Foundations: “You said, I must eat so many lemons, because I am so bitter. I said I’d rather be with your friends mate, because they are much fitter!” In fact, Bourgeois’ bitterness and black humour was refreshing in an art world full of namby-pamby, hippies - trying to commune with nature or the Earth Goddess.  Bourgeois like the brilliant Post-Feminist Camille Paglia – held no such Utopian notions of femininity – she was as terrified by the chthonian nightmare as by the patriarchal daydream. Paglia tellingly described in (Sexual Persona, 1990, P.5-6) Western Civilizations fear of the chthonian thus: “Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood… The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities, which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

           

Perhaps in October 2007 - Brian Sewell was right when he wrote in The London Evening Standard: “Her work is enthusiastically exhibited only because she is, or pretends to be, a woman who hates men. This is political correctitude gone mad: the work of any male sculptor who did with female genitals what she has done with the penis would never see the light of day and, regarded as a psychopathic danger to society, nor would he.”

           

As a male artist of this kind of ilk – I could testify to the truth of his statement, but if the art world could grant the likes of Picasso, the right to his misogyny - then it had to grant Bourgeois the right to her misandry.

           

Personally, I believed art was an arena in which artists could battle with their demons - safe in the knowledge that the only detrimental effect on society – was offending a few narrow minded prudes. Even if Bourgeois did hate men (which I doubted) at least she had the courage and honesty - to let everyone into the anti-chamber of her fears. I did not believe that repression or lies could ever be a cure for mental instability – so the artist had a duty to express the unexpressed. In fact many women have feelings of hatred towards men and many men have feelings of hatred towards women – but what was more damaging to society I thought than these fears and prejudices – was their unspoken and unreflective promotion of acts of cruelty and injustice.