Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child (in context) by Worcester Art Museum

Louise Bourgeois

The Woven Child (in context)

WORCESTER ART MUSEUM

Louise Bourgeois

The Woven Child (in context) October 21, 2006 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; February 25, 2007

WORCESTER ART MUSEUM

This project is generously supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund. Other generous support provided by WICN Public Radio 90.5 FM, New England’s Jazz & Folk Station.

Published by the Worcester Art Museum 55 Salisbury Street Worcester, Massachusetts 01609 www.worcesterart.org

ISBN 0-936042-15-X

Foreword Since it’s founding in 1898, the Worcester Art Museum has benefited from acquiring works by recognized living artists. The Museum’s strong holdings of paintings by America’s leading Impressionists— Benson, Cassatt, Hassam—many of them purchased within a few years of their creation, is perhaps the best lesson to us all. A century later, the acquisition of Louise Bourgeois’ The Woven Child (2002) continues this tradition and at the same time is unique in representing an artist still actively creating toward the end of her own century. Perhaps the closest example of the Museum’s collecting of an artist still active in his senior years is one of its most visionary purchases: two contemporary paintings by Monet acquired in 1910. At the time, Monet was 70 years old and would remain active until his death in 1926. At 95 and as creative as ever, Bourgeois offers in her Woven Child

one of her most poignant expressions of a dominant theme throughout her work— human relationships. The Museum is extremely pleased to acquire this major sculpture by Bourgeois, whose subject of mother and child offers new insights into a theme that appears throughout our permanent collection. We are grateful to Susan Stoops for this very thoughtful acquisition and for the exhibition of related works that provide a greater appreciation of this contemporary master. We would also like to express our gratitude to the lenders of these other pieces, especially their willingness to share them so close to the time they were created.

James A. Welu Director

The Woven Child, 2002 Fabric, stainless steel, glass, and wood < 70 x 35 x 21 inches Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 2005.284 Photo: Stephen Briggs

Louise Bourgeois

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Louise Bourgeois in the garden of her family home in Choisy-le-Roi in 1916. Behind the house is a two-story atelier for the tapestry workers. The plot of land in the back is very large and extends to the Seine River below. Photo: Louise Bourgeois archive

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Louise Bourgeois

Introduction

“All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” 1

ouise Bourgeois, who at 95 was described recently as “the oldest of young artists,” 2 has been making art since the 1940s yet continues to be one of the most inventive and influential artists of our time. To put her longevity and decades of relevance in perspective with other artists who remained innovative over long careers, think Michelangelo, Monet, or Picasso. It is worth remembering, too, that Bourgeois is of the same generation as David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, and Philip Guston. Indeed, her career has spanned Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Postminimalist and feminist-inspired art, and installation art, but her work always has remained fiercely independent from any singular style or movement. Trained as a painter, printmaker, and draftsperson, Bourgeois has experimented with a range of materials for sculptures over the years (including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex) and in the late 1990s, she embarked on what has become an extraordinary body of sculptural and two-dimensional works in fabric.

As she continues to make unprecedented decisions in the studio, it seems apparent that the consequences of Bourgeois’ late works for the field of contemporary art are more “forward-looking than retrospective.”3 (Again, one is reminded of the impact of the ground-breaking late works of Monet or Guston.) This late-in-life chapter of her career is especially significant because it brings Bourgeois back to her “original aesthetic impulse”—working with textiles.4 At the age of 12 she began to work at her mother’s side in the family business of restoring Medieval and Renaissance tapestries in Antony, France.5 She assumed the role of ‘dessinateur,’ redrawing the sections of the missing parts of the antique tapestries, which would then be rewoven.6

Louise Bourgeois

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“…I, myself, have very long associations with tapestries. As children, we used them to hide in. This is one reason I expect them to be so three-dimensional—why I feel they must be of such a height and weight and size that you can wrap yourself in them…My personal association with tapestry is for this reason, highly sculptural in terms of the three-dimensionality.” 7

lthough rooted in her lived (and gendered) experiences as daughter, wife, and mother, the content of Bourgeois’ art is primarily “archetypal”8 and explores the psychological and emotional effects of human relations, forsaking neither the intimacies nor the anxieties. Bourgeois’ self-described interest in the “drama of one among many”9 once was characterized by Lucy Lippard in terms of the “weights and pressures and anxious zones of close interaction.”10 These conditions, both physical and emotional, are at the heart of several important recurring thematics in the fabric works—the fusion of architecture and the body, images of coupling, the garment as a site of female experience, and the maternal subject.

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Louise Bourgeois

The Worcester exhibition focuses on a selection of Bourgeois’ fabric works from 1996-2006, and includes the U.S. premiere of a major fabric sculpture, The Woven Child (2002), recently acquired by the Museum. The project seeks to introduce what is new in this artist’s prolific career while also demonstrating the continued relevance of textiles to Bourgeois. Cloth remnants recycled into columns, figures, and books have become an ideal medium for recovering and exorcising aspects of her childhood and family life.11

Louise Bourgeois restoring a tapestry fragment, 1990. Photo: Peter Bellamy

Louise Bourgeois

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I Reconstructing the Past

n Bourgeois’ experienced hands, objects born of cutting and sewing become the embodiments of past events in her life but also are symbolic of the destructive and reparative impulses that fuel the creative process.13 Coming from a tradition of tapestry that was in her family for generations (her mother’s mother had her own atelier in Aubusson),14 Bourgeois understands that “this sense of reparation is very deep within me,” and she especially associates it with vivid memories of her mother “who would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it.”15 In an early drawing, Skeins (1943), Bourgeois added faces to two skeins of wool transforming them into figures and intimately linking personal identity to the materiality of textiles. Similarly, an abstract sculpture from the late 1940s bears the identity of Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle. Even Bourgeois’ preferred

titled Personages. Described by others as totem-like and needle- or bobbin-like shaped lozenges, Bourgeois conceived of them as surrogates for the human figure (one from 1947-49 is titled for her son, Portrait of JeanLouis). In her solo exhibitions in 1949 and 1950 at the Peridot Gallery in New York, Bourgeois deliberately installed them directly on the floor with some in groups and others solitary but always emphasizing the relation to each other and the space around them. As she explained, “Even though the shapes are abstract, they represent people. They are delicate as relationships are delicate. They look at each other and they lean on each other.”17 This situational dynamic between objects inhabiting and activating the environments in which they sit, stand, hang, or lie remains a critical constant in Bourgeois’ practice today and is especially evident in her fabric Towers and hanging Couples.

“ I have always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.” 12 palette of reds and blues might be traced to the natural dyes (cochineal and indigo) she remembers her mother using for the tapestries.16 Recognizable tools from her family’s trade—needles, spools of thread, and tapestry fragments—appear with greater frequency as sculptural elements in the early ’90s in works such as In Respite (1993), Sutures (1993), and Red Room (Child) and Red Room (Parent) from 1994. And around 1996, Bourgeois’ ongoing interest in textiles and her preoccupation with the past lead to several Untitled sculptures incorporating actual garments scavenged from her closets and suspended from rods connected to a central pole.

Louise Bourgeois’ mother Joséphine < in the tapestry gallery, circa 1911. Photo: Louise Bourgeois archive

Given that the relation of past to present has been a central dialectic in Bourgeois’s practice for more than six decades, it is not surprising that her recent fabric sculptures revisit formal and thematic terrain explored earlier in other media. For example, a series of fabric towers from the past few years are closely related to a group of anthropomorphic, wooden sculptures begun in the 1940s and collectively

This “impulse toward working with the terms of real space”18 demonstrated decades ago in Bourgeois’ installations of the Personages, announced her preference for an “encounter” with her work that invites the projection of meaning from the viewer and as such anticipated her Cells (begun in the mid-1980s), large installations in partially open chambers or cages whose theatrical spaces, filled with arrangements of mostly familiar found objects, suggest narratives of isolation and solitude, exposure and imprisonment.19 (In some of the Cells, such as Cell XXV (View of the World of the Jealous Wife) from 2001, Bourgeois introduced stuffed mannequin-like figures draped in her old garments.) Around this same time, Bourgeois adopted the use of another physical enclosure—a stainless steel, glass, and wood vitrine—as an integral element of her smaller fabric sculptures. Furniture-like yet clinical, closed yet transparent, the vitrine, while isolating the fragile figures from us, has like the Cells “the capacity to house or enclose its own world of associations.”20

Louise Bourgeois

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Towers

“…Life is made of experiences and emotions. The objects I have created make them tangible.” 21

uring the 1950s, Bourgeois created a series of stacked pillars, descendants of the carved totems but also early examples of the tower format used in the fabric sculpture, The Cold of Anxiety (2001). Although composed of different materials (including recycled wood scraps and plaster fragments), these early columns such as Femme Volage (1951) were formed out of similar but not identical elements that were stacked vertebrae-like on a fixed axis. Clearly erect, their postures appeared nonetheless unstable. When Bourgeois recently returned to this format using various stuffed fabrics (from solid and striped to image-laden tapestry), the effect was an emotive identification of the architectural with the body, in part because of a “change from rigidity to pliability.” 22 For example, the human scale, flesh-pink palette, and pillow-like units of The Cold of Anxiety invoke intimate sensations. Viewing invites an awareness of the relations between the individual sections, hand sewn and stuffed, softly resting upon one another and progressively growing as the column gains height. Yet amidst this physical embodiment of connecting and touching, Bourgeois counters with an emotional confession—the phrase “the cold of anxiety” subtly embroidered onto the sculpture’s surface.

The Cold of Anxiety, detail The Cold of Anxiety, 2001 Fabric and steel, 82 x 12 x 10 inches Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York > Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Christopher Burke

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Louise Bourgeois

Coupling

“ People feel each other, perceive each other, turn toward or away from each other…fated to walk together as part of an ongoing phenomenon…always perceiving others and adjusting to them.” 23

uch of Bourgeois’ recent fabric work has taken the form of small stuffed figures—individuals, couples, or groups—suspended in open air or sheltered in glass and steel vitrines. Despite being crudely stitched and patched together from various solid-color remnants (including terry cloth toweling, knits, and flannel) and endowed with only minimal anatomical detail, they exude a powerful range of attitudes and emotions, from the amorous and playful to the anguished and rejected. Bourgeois’s cloth rag-dolls, whether male or female, young or old, are exposed in their raw emotions and nakedness.

< Seven in a Bed, 2001 Fabric, stainless steel, glass, and wood 68 x 33.5 x 34.5 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Christopher Burke

Couple, 2001 Fabric, 20 x 6.5 x 3 inches < Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Christopher Burke

In one Couple (2000), a female hovers slightly above her partner, her feet resting atop his and her arms wrapped tightly around him. In a role reversal, here it is the male whom Bourgeois renders armless— an incomplete, helpless adult. As they dangle in the air, meaning drifts between tender embrace and a desperate attempt to hold onto the other. Similarly, in Seven in a Bed (2001), the entangled arrangement of pink bodies (some with more than one head) sprawled across a bed suggests domestic narratives that may have been inspired by innocent childhood play, adult knowledge, or a memory confusing both. What is certain, however, is Bourgeois’ absorption with the human need for security and desire to connect. Her mute, fragile figures communicate intimacy as a tangle of pleasure and pain, aggression and submission. Louise Bourgeois

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Garments

“…clothing is a metaphor of the years that pass… For me fashion is the experience of living in this dress, in those shoes. It’s a three-dimensional experience.” 24

ourgeois’ work “deals with being a woman in a way that Freud could not have fathomed,” observed critic Donald Kuspit. “It talks about things we don’t want talked about, acknowledges forces we don’t want broadcast loudly, and certainly not let loose.”25 Harmless Woman (1969) and Torso (Self-Portrait) (1963-4) are but two examples of a number of sculptural versions of a limbless (and faceless) woman, which anticipate the adult body in The Woven Child—a figure reduced to “belly, breasts and neck,” symbolic of “female fecundity” but also helplessness.26 In an Untitled 1996 cloth and bronze sculpture, we see a tragicomic interpretation of an incapacitated, limbless

female defined entirely by a suspended and stuffed, reconstructed dress that appears more like a straightjacket. Her only appendage—long, limp, and tail-like— dangles down to the floor providing a visual and emotional counterweight to the tightly wrapped bronze coil hanging opposite her. While not altogether empty, this “bodiless” garment unmistakably references “the female experience, located in the body, sensed from within…”27 Although it has left the closet and life of the younger Bourgeois who wore it, the dress retains a memory of her past, which in its resurgence in the present has the powerful effect of “the return of the repressed.”28

Untitled, 1996 Cloth, bronze, and steel, 115.5 x 43 x 35 inches Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York > Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Christopher Burke

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Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois and her mother JosĂŠphine, circa 1915. Photo: Louise Bourgeois archive

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Louise Bourgeois

Mother

“ The bond between a mother and a child is important. It is from here that our relationship to others and the world begins.” 29

s Robert Storr has observed, in numerous sculptures since the mid-1980s, Bourgeois has wrestled with and paid homage to the archetypal image of the Mother in various expressions of tenderness, ferocity, and inadequacy.30 At their source is the idealized memory of her own mother, Joséphine, who died in 1932 from a chronic lung ailment while in her daughter’s care (and, of course, Bourgeois’ experience of being the mother of three sons). Even at the age of 70, Bourgeois expressed a deep connection between the iconography of her art and this relation: “I felt that when I represented the two naked bodies of the child and the mother, I can still feel her body and her love.”31

In the image of a multi-breasted She-Fox (1985), the head of a young girl hides beneath the animal’s powerful haunches. It is, wrote the artist, “the portrait of a relation. It is an expression of the faith a child can have in a parent and of the violence between the strong and the weak.”32 In her ongoing series of Spiders (begun in the 1990s), Bourgeois turns to a symbol of both protector and predator (the good and bad Mother) that is also emblematic of Joséphine—“…my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me…”33 Symbolically, the spider also connects to the family’s business activities of spinning, weaving, and sewing, which took place (as the young Louise knew firsthand) under the skilled and watchful eye of her mother.

Louise Bourgeois

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The Woven Child

“ Fear of abandonment has stayed with me my whole life. It began when my father left for the war. It continued when my mother died in 1932. People ask me to ‘be their mother.’ I can’t because I’m looking for a mother myself.” 34

n The Woven Child (2002), Bourgeois’ dramatic reinterpretation of a subject found throughout the history of art— the mother and child—she engages in dialectics of self and other, estrangement and intimacy, awkwardness and tenderness, inadequacy and promise. Bourgeois, the artist and mother, imagines the maternalinfant relation in radically unconventional terms, which challenge the patriarchal mother who was traditionally idealized in religious and secular images in Western art—from Raphael’s madonnas to Mary Cassatt’s mothers.

First, Bourgeois consciously chose a fragile and domestic material (fabric remnants from garments and linens she owned) not typically used for sculpture but laden with human associations such as warmth, intimacy, and vulnerability.35 In a further departure from tradition Bourgeois returned to her motif of the headless and limbless female for the mother, who is now a patchwork torso of crudely stitched scraps that neither embraces nor gazes upon the perfect little infant curled upon her belly.

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Louise Bourgeois

In contrast to the pristine muslin of the child, the rag-tag mother pieced together with varying white remnants (complete with the occasional stain and defect) bares the marks of age and experience, as if admitting to us, “Here is what it is like to have and be a body, to be holed up in a fleshy self.”36 Against the image of wholeness projected by the infant, the fragmented female is a confession to maternal feelings of inadequacy yet also an acknowledgment of the status of our incompleteness as adults, whether female or male. Because there is no implicit subject position from which to experience Bourgeois’ work, adult viewers may find that they identify with parent and/or child. What is fundamental, however, is how the mother-child relation in The Woven Child compels us to wonder, what is it like to be at the beginning of life?

The Woven Child, 2002 Fabric, stainless steel, glass, and wood > 70 x 35 x 21 inches Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 2005.284 Photo: Christopher Burke

T The Maternal Subject

his “beginning,” this “dynamic of the maternal-infantile relation,” translates visually in The Woven Child as an attempt to “combine the mother’s viewpoint and the child’s” as subjects who live “in and through” their bodies and in relation to the other.38 A glass and steel vitrine both protects and imprisons this vulnerable pair. With its womb-like, finely woven blue netting that provides a more amorphous enclosure as well as an added layer of separation around the child, The Woven Child constitutes a melding of sexualized space and sanctum. Another touch of blue exposed at the mother’s neck alerts us to a fragile yet lasting link between these individual bodies. For Bourgeois, the usual

“a taboo on maternal ambivalence,” which Parker argues, “inflects both cultural representations of the mother and the social arrangements of motherhood...the representation of ideal motherhood is still almost exclusively made up of self-abnegation, unstinting love, intuitive knowledge of nurturance and unalloyed pleasure in children.”43 Despite her own warning that, “An artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously,”44 it is important to note that on many occasions Bourgeois has publicly shared her feelings about being a mother. She has stated, “The most important event in my life was the birth of Jean-Louis” (her son).45 Yet she often sounds genuinely conflicted

“ If you hold a naked child against your naked breast, it is not the end of softness, it is the beginning of softness, it is life itself.” 37 physical distinctions between inside and outside, body and environment are instead decidedly mutable. Equally radical about Bourgeois’ conception of mother and child is the apparent duality of intimacy and detachment. In light of recent scholarship, in particular that of art historian Mignon Nixon, who argues for a reading of Bourgeois’ work that is grounded in the controversial psychoanalytic feminism pioneered by Melanie Klein (1882-1960), The Woven Child can be interpreted as symbolic of maternal ambivalence.39 Ambivalence as defined by feminist psychoanalyst, Rozsika Parker, is the “concept developed by psychoanalysis according to which quite contradictory impulses and emotions toward the same person co-exist”40 and can be applied to the conflicts confronting women at every stage of motherhood. Parker, paraphrasing Anna Freud, suggests, “No degree of devotion on the part of the mother can successfully cope with the boundless demands made on her by her child.”41 Nixon credits Bourgeois’ sculptures with playing a “pivotal role” in constructing a “theory of the maternal subject” and reminds us that Bourgeois was serious enough about child analysis to take psychology classes and consider professional training in the field in the early 1960s.42 The Woven Child challenges {26}

Louise Bourgeois

and frequently expresses a sense of inadequacy and failure at meeting the expectations she had, based on her own idealized version of her mother’s performance: “My mother appeared strong to me. In my eyes she was perfect. I am not as good as she was….”46 On another occasion, she described a maternal anxiety that “persisted after conception. This is not something which disappears. For instance, when the children are much older you are afraid of something else. You are afraid of losing them; you are afraid of being abandoned; you are afraid of becoming aggressive; you are afraid of lots of things. So it is not a thing which stops once they are born. It diminishes, but it does not stop.”47 Cultural theorist Mieke Bal suggests that while the subjects of Bourgeois’ sculptures are lodged deep within the artist’s memories, their narratives are activated by us as viewers.48 Indeed, the sheer accessibility and universality of The Woven Child ’s subject, combined with the way that its exposed patchwork and stitching tells the story of how it was made, assure that knowledge of the artist’s specific biography is not necessary for the uninitiated viewer to have a powerful and personal experience of the work. Bourgeois’ lived experience yields to the presentness of viewing and the “pastness of each viewer’s memories”49 that her work unlocks.

Lullaby, 2006 Silkscreen on fabric, suite of 25 15.25 x 11.375 inches each Collection of the artist Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Stephen Briggs

Louise Bourgeois

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Lullaby, detail

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Louise Bourgeois

Lullaby, detail

Louise Bourgeois

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Forgetfulness and a Lullaby

“ …constructing drawings out of fabric and sewing gives a physicality to the two-dimensional surface.” 50

Ode à l’oubli, 2004 Fabric and color lithograph book (36 pages) 10.75 x 13.25 x 2 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Photo: Christopher Burke

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Louise Bourgeois

n important parallel activity to the fabric sculptures is a body of drawings, prints, and books executed in textiles. Ode à l’oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), a 2004 fabric and color lithograph book stitched from remnants Bourgeois has saved throughout her life (many from her clothing and linens), reads like an index of the abstract, symbolic terrain her art has explored over the past six decades. The palette, like much of her work, favors blues, pinks, and reds51 and recurrent motifs include egg, eye, breast, and pod shapes, spirals, arrows, stacked rectangles, and spider-web and kaleidoscopic patterns. On its 36 pages (which unbutton from the binding to be displayed separately), “hundreds of swatches of fabric are cut and pieced, appliquéd, embroidered, tufted, rolled, woven, quilted, layered. Traditional techniques like couching and rouleau work are used.” 52 In addition to silks, knits, tulles, organza, and netting found throughout, Bourgeois’ monogrammed linen napkins provided the ground for many of the pages of the original book on which the limited edition is based. Here embroidered lines and stitched seams, even the organic tracery of a lace pattern, act like a kind of three-dimensional drawing on the fabric page. Stripes and checks of dresses and tablecloths infuse the modernist grid with the intimacy of life’s moments. Artfully interwoven with the lived histories of the fabrics, which mark specific

relationships, places, and times, is a page of text (one of two) with Bourgeois’ enigmatic remark, “I had a flashback of something that never existed.” For a recent homage to mother and child, Bourgeois has composed a visual Lullaby (2006). In this suite of 25 silkscreens on fabric, red silhouettes sit atop fabric pages patterned with the staffs of music paper. She frequently has turned to this “found” pattern for drawings and sketchbooks (such as Memory Traces, 2002, and Fugue, 2003), sometimes as an organizing structure and at other times as a foil of regularity to react against. Here, the swollen and curved shapes, so organic and individual in character, contrast sharply with the strict linearity and repetition of the staff. Yet in their translation onto fabric, the staffs, too, have an element of softness, a bit like the blue stripes on the ticking of a mattress or pillow. 53 This exquisite coupling of emotional intimacy and formal bravura calls to mind Arthur Miller’s observation about Bourgeois’ work: “…It is an art, first of the eye of course, but finally of the interior life into which vision leads. In effect, she is as though talking profoundly to herself, just loudly enough to be overheard.” 54

Susan L. Stoops Curator of Contemporary Art

Ode à l’oubli, detail

Louise Bourgeois

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Ode à l’oubli, detail

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Louise Bourgeois

Ode à l’oubli, detail

Louise Bourgeois

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Notes 1. Louise Bourgeois, “Louise Bourgeois: Album” (1994), in Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 277. 2. Frances Morris, Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time (London: August Projects in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2005), 10. 3. Robert Storr, “A Sketch for a Portrait: Louise Bourgeois,” in Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), 93.

17. Bourgeois in Charlotta Kotik, “The Locus of Memory: An Introduction to the Work of Louise Bourgeois,” Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, 1982-1993. Ed. Charlotta Kotik, Terrie Sultan, and Christian Leigh (New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Brooklyn Museum, 1994), 18. 18. Rosalind Krauss, “Magician’s Game: Decades of Transformation,” 200 Years of American Sculpture (New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976). Excerpt in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 100.

4. Morris, 32.

19. Morris points out that the overt narratives of the Cells opened “the work to serious psychoanalytic study exploring Freudian, Lacanian, and Kleinian models” (Morris, 22).

5. Ibid., 101.

20. Krauss in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 100.

6. Ibid., 20.

21. Bourgeois statement (1997), Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 5.

7. Bourgeois, “The Fabric of Construction,” Craft Horizons, vol. 29, no. 2 (1969), 30-35. Reprinted in Bernadac and Obrist, 89. 8. Storr, 33. 9. Bourgeois, “An Artist’s Words,” Design Quarterly, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, no. 30 (1954), 18. Reprinted in Bernadac and Obrist, 66.

22. Bourgeois in Deborah Wye, “Louise Bourgeois: One and Others,” Louise Bourgeois (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 24. These words described an earlier stylistic development in works from the early 1960s but seem equally characteristic of the relation between the early columns and the fabric towers.

10. Lucy Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out,” Artforum, March 1975. Excerpt in Jerry Gorovoy and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1977), 136.

23. Bourgeois in Wye, 92.

11. At the time of her first retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bourgeois created a photo essay titled “Child Abuse,” for Artforum (vol. 20, 1983, 40-47) in which she made public the details of her conflicted and sexually traumatic family upbringing. At its center was the confession that her father’s English mistress was brought into the house as the children’s tutor, where she lived for ten years. She describes that having to ignore this infidelity and tolerate her mother’s acquiescence during her formative years, put her in the role of a pawn and effectively living a lie. Since then, this episode figures prominently in most of the written material about the artist—too much so according to some noted feminist critics such as Mieke Bal and Anne Wagner. But her biographer, Robert Storr, concludes “Bourgeois suffered terrible damage as a result of the stress she experienced in the sexually immature years of her childhood and early adolescence. The obsessional return to those traumatic times, and the hope-against-hope that that damage can be undone or patched has been the driving force behind everything she has made” (Storr, 40).

25. Donald Kuspit, “Louise Bourgeois. Where Angels Fear to Tread,” Artforum, March 1987, 115-120.

12. Bourgeois, “Gerald Matt in Conversation with Louise Bourgeois,” in Louise Bourgeois. AllerRetour, ed. Gerald Matt and Peter Weiermair (Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg and Kunsthalle Wien, 2005), 201. 13. For a discussion of the role of aggression and forms of reparation in the context of theories of creativity (by Melanie Klein and others) see Rozsika Parker, “Killing the Angel in the House: Creativity, Femininity and Aggression,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol.79 (1998), 757-774. 14. Bourgeois, “A Memoir: Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Beckert,” remarks from a conversation recorded in the late 1970s. Reprinted in Bernadac and Obrist, 117. 15. Bourgeois in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, “‘I am a Woman with no Secrets’ Statements by Louise Bourgeois,” Parkett, 27, 1991, 45.

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16. Bourgeois in Bernadac and Obrist, 120.

Louise Bourgeois

24. Bourgeois in a 1996 interview by Paolo Herkenhoff, “Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Temps,” in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 270.

26. Storr, 74. The faceless female recurs as a motif in the artist’s Femme Maison (Woman House) images in which a house variously sits atop naked legs and torso. These appeared initially in the 1940s as paintings, drawings, and prints, and most recently in 2001 as a fabric sculpture. 27. Robert Hughes, “Ashambles in Venice,” Time, June 28, 1993. Excerpt in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 166.

of Melanie Klein, which reject the Oedipal narratives of Freud to instead center on the role of the mother in child analysis. In her reading of Klein’s account of the formation of subjectivity, Nixon describes “the infant’s primitive ego as attempting to ‘build up’ a relation to the outside world, beginning with the mother’s body” (183). 39. In the final pages of Nixon’s text, “Epilogue: Spider,” she addresses how Bourgeois’ sculpture, since her MOMA retrospective in 1982, has “insistently returned to the mother—as a figure of anxiety and ambivalence” (273). 40. Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London, Virago, 1995). 41. Review of Rozsika Parker’s Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York: Basic Books, 1995) by Anne Roiphe, “Crimes of Attachment,” The New York Times, May 12, 1996. Roiphe refers to Parker’s belief that a culture like ours, “which puts so much emphasis on maternal ideals, makes it harder for us to recognize our complex feelings toward our children.” 42. Nixon 12, 267. 43. Parker, Torn in Two, 21-22. 44. Bourgeois, “An Artist’s Words,” Design Quarterly, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, no. 30 (1954), 18. Reprinted in Bernadac and Obrist, 66. 45. Bourgeois in conversation with Paulo Herkenhoff in Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), 9. 46. Bourgeois in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, “Designing for a Free Fall,” Louise Bourgeois (Zurich, Ammann Verlag, 1992). Excerpt in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 103. 47. Bourgeois in conversation with Deborah Wye (1979) in Bernadac and Obrist, 125. 48. Mieke Bal, “Autotopography: Louise Bourgeois as Builder,” Biography, vol. 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002), 184. 49. Bal, 195.

28. This phrase by Bourgeois is one of two pages of text in her fabric book, Ode à l’oubli, 2004.

50. Bourgeois in Gerald Matt and Peter Weiermair, 201.

29. Bourgeois in a 2006 interview by Thom Collins, The Walters Magazine (Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, Spring 2006), 5.

51. Bourgeois in Christiane Meyer-Thoss. Excerpt in Bernadac and Obrist, 222. “Color is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication. Blue represents peace, meditation, and escape. Red is an affirmation at any cost—regardless of the dangers in fighting—of contradiction, of aggression. It’s symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved. Black is mourning, regrets, guilt, retreat. White means go back to square one. It’s a renewal, the possibility of starting again, completely fresh. Pink is feminine. It represents a liking and acceptance of the self.”

30. Storr, 43. 31. Bourgeois in conversation with Deborah Wye (1981) in Bernadac and Obrist, 128. 32. Bourgeois in Robert Storr, “Meanings, Materials, and Milieu—Reflections of Recent Works by Louise Bourgeois,” Parkett, no. 9 (1986), 82-5. 33. Bourgeois, excerpt from text for a suite of 9 etchings, Ode à ma mere (Ode to my Mother), 1995 (Paris, Editions du Solstice). 34. Bourgeois’ reflection on The Woven Child forwarded to the author on June 14, 2006 via e-mail by studio director, Wendy Williams. 35. Bourgeois’ experiments with pliable, “soft” materials like latex and resins in the 1960s may have played a role in her later turn to fabric for sculpture. 36. Ann M. Wagner, “Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (1999), 23. 37. Bourgeois in conversation with Deborah Wye (1981) in Bernadac and Obrist, 126. 38. Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (London, MIT Press, 2005), 9, 67. Nixon’s book considers Bourgeois within the context of the psychoanalytic theories

52. Amy Newman, “Louise Bourgeois Builds a Book From the Fabric of Life,” The New York Times, October 17, 2004. 53. In written comments from the Bourgeois Studio forwarded to the author by Cheim & Read in July 2006, the red forms are derived from the outline of tracings done by the artist of objects she owns. She began to see these shapes as an equivalent to musical notes and she placed them in sequence like a musical score. The curving quality of the forms refers to the rocking that the mother does to put the child to sleep, hence the title. 54. Arthur Miller, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, 1982-1993. Excerpt in Gorovoy and Asbaghi, 216.

Louise Bourgeois’ hands, 2003, detail. Photo: Felix Harlan

Acknowledgments There are numerous individuals whose commitment to the Worcester Art Museum’s program in contemporary art has made it possible to organize this exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ fabric works and to document the project with this publication. This exhibition marks the occasion of the U.S. premiere of The Woven Child (2002), a fabric sculpture acquired by the museum last year. I first wish to acknowledge the dedication and adventurous spirit of our Committee on the Collections, in particular Judy King under whose guidance, as Chair, the Museum made this extraordinary purchase. I also wish to express my appreciation to Jim Welu, Director, and Elizabeth Streicher, Director of Collections and Exhibitions, for their ongoing support for the contemporary program and their enthusiasm for this acquisition and exhibition. I extend my warm thanks to the artist and the Louise Bourgeois Studio, in particular Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy Williams, for sharing their invaluable knowledge and time with me throughout the past year and for their collaboration with loans for the exhibition. It is an honor to include Brigitte Cornand’s film portrait of Bourgeois, C’est le murmure de l’eau qui chante (2002), in conjunction with the exhibition. I am also extremely grateful to John Cheim and Adam Sheffer of Cheim & Read in New York, for their generosity of resources and spirit related to the acquisition and exhibition. For sharing her expertise, enthusiasm, and friendship with

Works in the Exhibition me over the years but in particular with this acquisition, I am truly indebted to Barbara Krakow. I extend my deepest thanks to Don and Mary Melville for their constant encouragement and ongoing financial commitment to bringing the work of leading contemporary artists to the Worcester Art Museum. I am grateful to work with many talented and dedicated colleagues at the Museum, in particular Kim Noonan, Manager of Publications and Graphic Design and designer of this publication; Patrick Brown, Exhibition Designer and Chief Preparator; Deborah Diemente, Registrar; Paula ArtalIsbrand, Objects Conservator; Deborah Aframe, Librarian; Allison Berkeley, Manager of Marketing and Public Relations; and Anne Sadick, Corporate, Foundation & Government Grants Coordinator. I also wish to acknowledge the scholarship of the following individuals whose exemplary texts about Bourgeois proved critical in my thoughts and words: Frances Morris, Mignon Nixon, Robert Storr, and Deborah Wye. It is truly a privilege to reflect on the artist’s fabric works and present The Woven Child in this context. Finally, I wish to dedicate this publication to my mother, Marilyn Stoops, and my son, Marlon Rainville.

Untitled, 1996, cloth, bronze, and steel 115.5 x 43 x 35 inches. Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York The Cold of Anxiety, 2001, fabric and steel, 82 x 12 x 10 inches. Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Couple, 2001, fabric, 20 x 6.5 x 3 inches. Collection of Jerry Gorovoy, New York, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Seven in a Bed, 2001, fabric, stainless steel, glass, and wood, 68 x 33.5 x 34.5 inches. Collection of the artist, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York The Woven Child, 2002, fabric, stainless steel, glass, and wood, 70 x 35 x 21 inches. Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 2005.284 Ode à l’oubli, 2004, fabric and color lithograph book, 36 pages, 10.75 x 13.25 x 2 inches. Collection of the artist, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Lullaby, 2006, silkscreen on fabric, suite of 25, 15.25 x 11.375 inches each. Collection of the artist, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York C’est le murmure de l’eau qui chante, a film portrait of Louise Bourgeois directed by Brigitte Cornand, will be screened throughout the exhibition. © Les Films du Siamois, France 2002

Susan L. Stoops Louise Bourgeois

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About the Artist Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics in 1932 but left the following year to study art and art history at the École des Beaux-Arts, the École du Louvre, the Académie Julian, and at the studio of Fernand Léger during the 1930s. In 1938 she married American art historian Robert Goldwater and emigrated to New York City where she has since lived and worked. They adopted the first of three sons, Michel, in 1939. Bourgeois gave birth to Jean-Louis in 1940 and Alain in 1941. Her marriage to Goldwater lasted until his death in 1972. Her first one-person exhibition was in 1945 at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York and her sculpture was first shown in 1949 in a solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery, New York. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the following decades. The first museum acquisition of her sculpture occured in 1951 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased Sleeping Figure (1950). Bourgeois is the first woman to be given a retrospective at the Museum

of Modern Art in New York (1982) and since then her works have been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe. Her first European retrospective was held in 1989 at the Frankfurter Kunstverien. In 1993, she represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. In 1997 she was presented the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton and in 1999 she was awarded The Golden Lion for a living master of contemporary art from the Venice Biennale. In 2000, she was commissioned by the Tate Modern in London for the inaugural installation at Turbine Hall. Among numerous international projects over the last decade were retrospectives at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Kyunggi-Do, Korea, in 2000 and at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 2001 (their first exhibition of a living American artist). Bourgeois will be the subject of an internationally touring retrospective in 2007 being organized by Tate Modern in London. She is represented in New York by Cheim & Read.

Louise Bourgeois, 2003 > Photo: Nanda Lanfranco

WORCESTER ART MUSEUM