Louise Bourgeois — an artist trapped in her own skin
The roiling depths of the sculptor’s psyche are explored alongside powerful works in a show at New York’s Jewish Museum
Maybe it’s spring, or a surge of pandemic-suppressed Eros — whatever the stimulus, New York’s museums are erupting with genitalia and erogenous zones. Niki de Saint Phalle’s fleshy Nanas and Yayoi Kusama’s hot flora have nicely set up Louise Bourgeois’s outsized harbingers of fertility.
At the Jewish Museum, an erect penis dangles from a hook in the ceiling. Its pair of pendulum-like spheres morphs into breasts, merging masculine and feminine forms. Down at ground level, a marble bulge begins to stir from its wooden plinth, looking both hard and soft, phallic and mammary.
These and other concupiscent works appear elegantly arrayed and tastefully lit, so that they swell into the space and visitors can admire them from multiple angles and distances. And yet Freud’s Daughter, a psycho-literary-artistic exploration curated by Bourgeois’s former archivist Philip Larratt-Smith, is less about her sculpture than her explorations of the mind. The vitrines are crammed with handwritten fragments and stream-of-consciousness texts, presented as an oeuvre equal to her creations in metal and stone.
“In literary quality and historical importance, the psychoanalytic writings bear comparison with the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the journals of Eugène Delacroix, and the letters of Vincent van Gogh,” Larratt-Smith writes. “Along with her diaries, they establish Bourgeois’s status as an artist-writer of the first rank.” That’s a big claim and not the only one the show has trouble supporting. The other is that all those pages offer a key to her sculpture’s true meanings.
Bourgeois spent decades in therapy. Having trained as a mathematician at the Sorbonne, she always retained a craving for structure. When she switched fields, her new calling helped her resolve the contradiction between order and instinct, rationality and feeling. Later, psychoanalysis supplied the concept of sublimation, which for Bourgeois meant moulding shapeless wrath into meaning and harmony. Rancour and revenge would give way to forgiveness. That was the theory, anyway.
In practice, forgiveness was a long shot, especially when it came to her own shortcomings and mental afflictions. “I’ve schlepped Louise Bourgeois around with me for more than 40 years,” she wrote in the early 1950s. “Every day brought its wound, and I carried my wounds ceaselessly, without remission, like a hide perforated beyond hope of repair. I am a collection of wooden pearls never threaded — and perfectly idiotic.”
Her father died in 1951, a loss that propelled her to the couch of Dr Henry Lowenfeld, a Freud disciple who had emigrated from Berlin to New York in 1938 (the same year Bourgeois arrived from Paris). She saw him, on and off, for 30 years, until he died.
They mostly worked on her rage — at her father over his infidelities and her mother for tolerating them, at her husband and children, women she saw as rivals, domestic obligations that prevented her from focusing on work, and the lethargy that descended when she was finally free to spend hours in her studio. So many forms of fury left their mark on paper, on marble, and on the people in her life. “When I do not ‘attack’ I do not feel myself alive,” she scrawled across a sheet of loose-leaf paper.
Pain was a powerful motivator, she explained. Art served as therapy, as a way to exorcise family dysfunction, abuse, and violent impulses
The curator’s task is to organise those scalding emotions into a cool exhibition, to display them so that viewers can skim the roiling depths of Bourgeois’s psyche and come away having peered with a little more clarity into her art.
He does this first by printing and framing her utterances, like the sayings of some deranged prophet: “A germ of rage cohabits like the germ of TB, it lives in you: small sometimes large other times, provoking infection aggression elation courage energy — your rage is your P you force it on people you control it you used to control it it became so much stronger that it is now like a wolfhound like a infected sleeping bitch, it can wake up — is rage feminine or masculine think about it — In everything like any live agent it functions independently from any other organism. it has a constant connection to me, good or bad; I could use an easier but flatter term — my aggression — I don’t like this name although I don’t know why —”
Larratt-Smith also channels Bourgeois’s cataracts of prose into tidy explanations of her sculpture. In this, he has help from the subject herself. After decades of discretion, she finally began to talk about her creative impulse at 70, prompted by MoMA’s 1982 retrospective and the unaccustomed celebrity it brought.
Pain was a powerful motivator, she explained. Art served as therapy, as a way to exorcise family dysfunction, abuse and violent impulses. She offered critics predigested interpretations, which seemed reductive rather than revelatory.
The show picks up where she left off. Her sometimes fascinating ramblings are offered up as the equivalent of 3D glasses, the key to making the picture cohere. Take the 1997 installation “Passage Dangereux”, a cramped, even frightening set of cages crammed with the bric-a-brac of a complicated life.
The curator provides a handy guide to its symbols: the pile of shirt cuffs is good old Dad, the little flask of Shalimar perfume “represents sexuality and the desire to seduce; the dead fly in the horse-shaped bottle, which got stuck and then died in the liqueur that attracted it, concretizes the equation of sex and death”. You could practically type each clue on a Post-it and stick it on the relevant object.
$!
But Bourgeois’s self-analysis and the show’s Freudian deconstructions wind up thinning out a rich clangour of associations and suggestions that will resonate with each viewer on a different frequency. Bourgeois’s power is that she confronted the world with incompatible demands: for sympathy and distance, hostility, fear and approval. With similarly contradictory impulses, Larratt-Smith wants the shards of writing to stand on their own as a feat of modern literature and at the same time to serve as glosses on the stuff that everyone’s really come to see.
Those tensions are authentic to Bourgeois. She never really wanted psychoanalysis to heal her, or to alleviate the discomfort she felt in her own skin. “Freud did nothing for . . . the artist’s torment,” she wrote in a 1990 essay. “To be an artist involves some suffering. That’s why artists repeat themselves — because they have no access to a cure.” Misery was her muse.