Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim, Peter Blum, and Cheim & Read

Spiders are known for their industrious persistence. At 97 years, Louise Bourgeois’ career is long and productive enough to map itself out as its own history of form, and that would be enough. But more patent than obvious shifts in material and form is the consistency of a thread, and a composure of thought.

A question such as ”When does emotion become physical?,” for example, might be uttered mid-career when there is an audience for it. The question emerges from the underside like the needle of a back stitch, its thread pulling taut over the past personnages of the late ‘40s. These oversized spindles and needles, made from the abandoned wood of water towers from the rooftops of New York, were explicitly an act of mourning for those left behind in France to the violence of war. Bourgeois also left behind a childhhood of emotional abuse, with the family business of repairing French tapestries providing its ground. Fifty years later in "Cell I" (1991) the needle re-appears from the underside to embroider the words “pain is the ransom of formalism” into bed linens, shocking the body out of aesthetic disinterest and into the world with a heap of tongs nearby. The shift from the animistic abstraction of the late '40s to the traumatic scene of the early '90s is an art historical one, but the consistency is personal.

Bourgeois distances herself from the Surrealist unconscious, finding stronger personal truth in sculpture’s capacity to draw from and render embodied memories. There is a simultaneous inquiry of the body and a honing of its expression that is not percolating through the unconscious so much as compelled by an immersed and witnessing mind. Bourgeois has a way of making the personal evident, and of being able to cast this evidence out into the world's readiness for it. To mention only a few such castings, her personages resonate with the Modernist animism of the late ‘40s; her twist of hemp in "Resin Eight" (1965) could be curated in 1966 as Eccentric Abstraction; her pictorial banquet serving up her own father as a meal could lead to a feminist banquet in her honor in 1974 (the same year that Judy Chicago began Dinner Party); her 1982 retrospective at MoMA arrived upon the scene in the heyday of feminist art historical scholarship; and a formalist historiography could be re-written through her work by Mignon Nixon - as the part-object - and Mieke Bal - as the fold.

As though responding to these graduated achievements over time, Bourgeois has recently been exhibiting books made from her old linens (below from Peter Blum in 2004). A button spine, like that of a children's book detouring language in order to show how to dress, allows one to undo and redo its pages as one wishes. Narrative time is irrelevant in a book that drapes its pages over the skin of the body. The applique of one side is something else again as the stitches on the other - the work of the needle barely echoes its own forms but holds fast nonetheless.


In her current show at Cheim and Read "A Baudelaire I" faces you from the doorway. Large metal etching plates, 60" tall, have been pressed into damp paper, leaving their black ink behind. There are two etchings, one of pods and the other unfolding leaves, that repeat twice in a series of four. Watercolor, gouache and pencil immerse and float in these deep black template forms.

For Baudeleire, nature is the source of our most hideous crimes, driving us to cannibalism, whereas artifice and adornment are the site of our morality. Beauty is divided between what is absolute - what is "eternal and invariable" - and what is relative - the circumstance of "contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion." Writing at a time when painters clothed their figures in the draperies of the classical and historical past, Baudelaire admires the clothing of the present as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent," and that modernity is visible in these specific and fleeting charms of fashion. A proud fashion bug, in her current body of work Louise Bourgeois has once again pulled her clothes from her closet.

There is a similarity to her first exhibited body of work, the personnages of the late '40s, and together the title of the exhibit, Echo, and the press release underwrite this connection. But the power of her current work would be lost in formal affiliations of art historical continuity. In "Echo IX" (2007) a fashionable coat has been turned on its head, becoming a carcass or slab of meat in the butcher's shop, its buttons the nipples of a sow, its pockets ruptured flesh, its folds invaginated. Cast bronze painted in white, it is as though the fashionable exterior has been pulled and bound by the spider's encasing web, a husk turned into meat and offering sustenance.

By Catherine Spaeth

Image credits:Installation view of Spider Couple at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, c. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY 2008, photo by David Heald;installation view of Personnages,at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, c. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY 2008, photo by David Heald; Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1986, watercolor, ink, oil, charcoal and pencil on paper, 23 3/4x19", Courtesy Cheim and Read, Galerie Karsten Grieve and Hauser and Wirth,photo Christopher Burke, c. Louise Bourgeois;Cumul I, 1968, marble, wood plinth, 20 1/16x50x48 1/16", Fonds national d'art contemporaine, attribution au Musee national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou en 1976, Cantre Pompidou, Paris,Musee national d'art moderne/Centre de Creation industrielle, c. Louise Bourgeois;Ode a l'oubli, published by Peter Blum Gallery; À BAUDELAIRE 1 2008,Etching, ink, watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper,4 panels,Approx. 60 x 40 inches each panel, courtesy of Cheim and Read; ECHO IX 2007,Bronze painted white, and steel,43 x 26 1/2 x 24 inches,
Edition 3/6, courtesy of Cheim and Read; THE GOOD BREAST 2007,Gouache on paper; suite of 20,14 5/8 x 11 inches, courtesy of Cheim and Read.