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From the Bell Jar to the Cage: The Developmental Path of Louise Bourgeois’s Cells Julienne Lorz When Louise Bourgeois created Articulated Lair in 1986, her oeuvre was already extensive. In the previous forty years, she had developed a rich and complex artistic language in a variety of mediums, ranging from small drawings to large installations. Articulated Lair anticipated a new series that Bourgeois later referred to as Cells. Remarkably, the series spans more than two decades, finding its conclusion in 2008, just two years before the artist’s death. While the psychological motivation behind her art, and the emotional tenor throughout her work, remains consistent in this series, the Cells are distinctive in their formal and spatial manifestations. They stand out as a major strand in Bourgeois’s long career, though not in isolation, but rather as a continuation of her artistic, conceptual, and personal concerns that were already dawning in the early 1940s. One might trace the trajectory back even further than this, for the artist herself has stated that all her work is rooted in her early childhood. While Bourgeois’s autobiography certainly plays an important role in her artistic endeavors, the focus here will be on the artworks, and, in particular, the conceptual and formal trajectory of the Cells. One work that could be considered an early harbinger of the Cells is a small, untitled ink drawing on pink paper from 1943. It shows a bell jar, under which a woman’s head is stuck on a peaked shape with a curved base. Her eyes are wide open and she is smiling, laughing even, despite the fact that she is detached from her body, cut off from her surroundings, and on display like a delicate specimen to be preserved and protected from outside influences. There is a peculiar oval outline that appears to be defining the contours of her face, but that simultaneously hovers in front of her face. The line might simply be evidence of the artist finding the final facial shape, but considering the emphasis on the eyes and their slight distortion, one might also think of the line as the edge of a magnifying glass or lens, which would certainly reverberate with several of the Cells created decades later. Interestingly, the bell jar itself, which is a motif that recurs in several of Bourgeois’s sculptures and prints, has magnifying properties through the curvature of the glass. But it is the implications of this drawing that are most striking: a woman imprisoned and yet seemingly enjoying isolation; the disconnected emotional state and detachment from the body; being protected by transparent glass that in itself is fragile; placed on display for all to see, yet unreachable in her confinement. These are aspects that Bourgeois elaborates further in her series of paintings titled Femme maison (literally: “woman house”), created between 1945 and 1947, soon after the “bell jar woman.” Here, she combines the naked female figure with architecture. The woman’s head, and at times her upper body, is replaced or hidden by a house. The woman is consequently silenced, “headless,” in an impassive, static, and isolated state, as the face is the part of a human being where individuality and communication are predominantly expressed, where emotions are transmitted through even minute facial expressions,
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where cognitive organs such as the eyes (the proverbial windows to the soul), nose, mouth, and ears receive visual, olfactory, oral, and aural messages. She has her head in a house (as opposed to in the clouds), or a house is her head, suggesting that this woman’s identity and realm of thought are contained within a domestic setting, therefore defining her in the traditional role of housewife and mother tending to house, home, and children.1 Her lower body and genitals are exposed, but despite her vulnerability, she stands her ground, providing the house with the steadfast foundation usually expected of buildings. In one of the paintings, though, the woman’s legs disappear thigh high into a plane of color, and in another the entire femme maison appears to be floating or falling before a black background. In Fallen Woman (1946 - 47), Bourgeois reverses the situation. In this horizontally oriented painting, the woman-this time recognizable by her female facial features and long hair-has lost her footing and it is the house that stands firmly on the ground, acting as or hiding her body and sexuality. Imprisoned in a different way, she is no longer able to move around freely. Since Bourgeois’s Femme maison paintings have windows and doors, a certain permeability and perhaps communication between the buildings’ inner and outer worlds is implied, in a similar way that the aforementioned drawing allows for an exchange between inside and outside via the transparency of the bell jar. There is, nevertheless, a sense of claustrophobia, which is also present in the bell jar drawing to a certain extent, since, despite the overemphasis on her smile, the woman is trapped and bodiless. This tallies with Bourgeois’s own suffering from both this fear and agoraphobia, to which she has derisively referred thus: “I love claustrophobic spaces. At least you know your limits.”2 While a house can be a place of safety, providing a protective skin shielding the private person from the public,3 it is, in addition, a place that silently bears witness to the occurrences within: it absorbs traces left by its inhabitants, physically storing the past as a place for memories. Mnemonic methods make use of this very characteristic when a building with all its idiosyncrasies serves as a structure through which the mind can drift in order to retrieve facts and knowledge.4 In He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), a portfolio of nine engravings, Bourgeois depicted predominantly tall, sober buildings reminiscent of New York’s skyscrapers, situated in deserted spaces. Even though the human figure is eschewed entirely here, the buildings play a similar role to the Femme maison paintings in that they are imbued with human attributes. Bourgeois stated: “My skyscrapers are not really about New York. Skyscrapers reflect a human condition. They do not touch.”5 In other words, these architectural constructions could be considered surrogates for people, echoing their physical relationships and the emotional dispositions thereby implicated. In the first three plates, for example, the insular buildings certainly appear to be “conducting themselves” in a most detached manner. This pictorial sobriety is further emphasized when considered in conjunction with the accompanying texts, which throughout the portfolio deal almost exclusively with human encounters6 involving disappointment, miscommunication, cruelty, or (violent) death. Only in Plate Seven does Bourgeois surprise with two wildly expressive, yet abstracted individual forms that seem to
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depict an emotional exchange between two people standing face-to-face on a building’s rooftop. Deborah Wye quotes Bourgeois’s reaction to this plate, in which she indeed appears to be speaking about human beings: “‘They are not alienated here; they are very engaged.’ This plate is the ‘only one with a fight. ... In the others, they are hiding, running away, or alienated.’”7 In this respect it is interesting to mention the alternative title of Plate Seven, namely, Two Personages.8 This is particularly pertinent since between the mid-1940s and the mid1950s,9 Bourgeois created a sculptural series which she likewise named Personages.10 Spatial Relations In 1949, Bourgeois exhibited several Personages sculptures at the Peridot Gallery in New York for the first time. Among them were Observer (1947 - 49), the most figurative, with recognizable arms, legs, torso, and head, painted white and the tallest at nearly two meters high; the slightly smaller Dagger Child (1947 - 49), a slim, elongated piece of wood painted black with rounded points at the top and bottom, to which similarly shaped and successively smaller pieces of wood are attached, and with a small dagger-like object, painted with a touch of red at the base of the blade, added to the outermost shape; and Portrait of Jean-Louis (1947–49), the smallest piece at not even a meter tall, which is painted white as well. Portrait of Jean-Louis is closest to the Femme maison paintings in that human legs form the basis for a building several windows high, with a door just above the crotch. Single lines carved into the rounded tip at the top of the sculpture suggest a head of hair. Were it not for the title, though, the figure could be considered sexless,11 unlike the clearly identifiable females in Femme maison. Apart from the considerable differences in composition, coloring, and height, what is particularly notable is the way in which each work was placed in relation to the others and to the overall exhibition space, as an installation shot shows. The small Jean-Louis, for instance, is situated close to the slightly taller and ostensibly protective piece The Tomb of a Young Person (1947 - 49), while the black-painted Dagger Child looms dangerously nearby. The fact that these works stand directly on the floor, precariously balanced and seemingly without a fixture, only adds to their fragility and the uncertainty of the situation.12 Images of Bourgeois’s second exhibition of Personages at the same gallery just a year later, in 1950, show that the works had become more articulate and gained more detail-some of it painted-and the spatial composition appears further refined, more assertive.13 Bourgeois had arranged the sculptures in such a way that the viewer had to physically navigate the space as in an all-encompassing installation, or as art critic Lucy Lippard wrote, an environment.14 Bourgeois remarked: “Instead of displaying pieces the space became part of the piece. ... The spectator is no longer merely a viewer if he is able to move from the stage of viewing to the stage of collaborating. ...”15 Despite the works being shown as a group, the individuality of each piece is, nevertheless, clearly pronounced. This is further underlined in the works’ titles, which were all listed on the exhibition’s
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announcement. Numbered from one to fifteen, the French titles refer mostly to figures who are performing an action of some sort, such as bringing bread, gazing at a house, leaning against a door, entering a room, carrying an object, waiting, or sleeping.16 Just two titles describe a designated location for a statue or figure: an empty house, a corner. Considering that Bourgeois has identified the sculptures as a way of “summon[ing] all the people I missed”17 after her emigration from France to New York in 1938, one might indeed perceive the careful spatial arrangement as a kind of family constellation similar to that used in therapy, where the distance between two people and the direction each person is facing is significant, revealing their emotional relationship to each other. While a viewer would not have been aware of Bourgeois’s personal history at this point in her career, and Bourgeois herself points out in a later interview that “it wasn’t just about individuals, it was about relations between people.... a social gathering of people,”18 Lippard writes that “observers remarked a painful sense of isolation.”19 Bourgeois describes the spatial arrangements thus: “Although ultimately each can and does stand alone, the figures can be grouped in various ways and fashions, and each time the tension of their relations makes for a different formal arrangement. All these figures not only have a relation to each other in space, but are related to the limits of the space in which they are set. It is part of the problem of the relation of the contained and the container.”20 (...)
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1 Mignon Nixon writes about Femme maison as a character invented by Bourgeois in relation to her personal biography, in order to “portray the predicament of a woman artist and mother, homesick in exile-carrying her house on her head-trying to make it as a surrealist in New York. With the caricature’s economy of means, the femme maison also combines the divergent roles surrealism ascribes to women-femme fatale, hysteric, female muse, phallic mother ... housewife.” Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 56. Deborah Wye points out that “the generally feminist dimension of this early imagery was recognized thirty years later,” in the latter part of the 1970s. See Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 18; also see Elisabeth Lebovici, “Is She? Or isn’t She?” in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate Modern, Tate Publishing, 2007), pp. 131–36. 2 Louise Bourgeois, in conversation with Jerry Gorovoy, 1993; published in “Claustrophobia,” in Morris, Louise Bourgeois, p. 81. 3 Though there are, of course, incidences, as news reports in recent years have shown, where exactly these walls of privacy have prevented terrible secrets from reaching the outside world. 4 See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “mnemonic,” accessed July 16, 2014, http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/386631/mnemonic; Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 5 Louise Bourgeois, “Self Expression is Sacred and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall/Konstruktionen für den freien Fall (Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1992), p. 178. 6 Exceptions are Plates Two and Six, where Bourgeois refers to specific buildings. Plate Two reads, “The solitary death of the Woolworth building,” while Plate Six simply states, “Leprosarium, Louisiana.” She is referring to death with both, albeit obliquely in the latter as a home to cure leprosy, which nonetheless often led to death. 7 Deborah Wye, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 89. 8 Ibid. 9 Josef Helfenstein, “Personages: Animism versus Modernist Sculpture,” in Morris, Louise Bourgeois, p. 207.
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10 The spelling of Personage varies throughout the different publications on the artist. It is also often spelled Personnage. Both stand for “person” or “personality,” but the French spelling incorporates the preposition personne, meaning “anybody,” “somebody,” or “nobody,” which is rather apt in light of the sculptural representations. 11 Jean-Louis is the second of three sons of Louise Bourgeois and her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater. Their first son, Michel, was adopted from France in 1939, and their third, Alain, was born in 1941. Born in 1940, Jean-Louis would have been a mere child of seven when Bourgeois created this work, which may explain her omission of the male sex. 12 As the installation shot shows, however, Dagger Child has a very small metal stand, as do several other works in this exhibition. 13 Nixon, “Personages: The Work of Mourning,” in Fantastic Reality, pp.119–63, esp. p. 124. 14 Lucy Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 240. 15 Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Susi Bloch, “An Interview with Louise Bourgeois,” Art Journal 35, no. 41 (Summer 1976): pp. 370 - 73. Reprinted as “Interview with Susi Bloch” in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923 - 1997, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 4th ed. 2007), pp. 104 - 5. 16 See image of announcement in Nixon, “Personages,” p. 125: 1. Figure qui apporte du pain, 2. Figure regardant une maison, 3. Figures qui supportent un linteau, 4. Figure qui s’appuie contre une porte, 5. Figure qui entre dans une pièce, 6. Statue pour une maison vide, 7. Deux figures qui portent un objet, 8. Une femme gravit les marches d’un jardin, 9. Figures qui attendent, 10. Figures qui se parlent sans se voir, 11. Figure endormie, 12. Figure pour une niche, 13. Figure quittant sa maison, 14. Figure de plein vent, 15. Figure emportant sa maison. 17 Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out,” p. 240. 18 Louise Bourgeois, quoted in an interview with Michael Auping, October 25, 1996; reprinted in Bernadac and Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, p. 352. 19 Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out,” p. 240. 20 Louise Bourgeois in Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for the Free Fall, p. 177.
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