Jun 10th 2010
WHEN she was photographed by the great Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois decided she needed a prop. She didn’t like to have her picture taken. At 70, she might have chosen a handbag, a book, a rose. Instead she took a two-foot-long, fully erect, fully veined and muscled phallus, which she had made of latex and plaster. She called it “Fillette”, and cradled it in her arms like a doll. Indeed, she said, it was not a phallus at all, but “Little Louise”. And with her sharp, puckish look, she dared anyone to contradict her.
Her sculptures were often not what they appeared to be. A beautiful white marble piece called “Cumul I” (1969) which seemed to show a cluster of eyes, or yet more phalluses, emerging from sheets, was about huddling together, she said; or just a collection of clouds. Her “Lair”, a big rubber pear-shape of 1986, was a hiding place, or a prison, or a peaceful orb, or a trap in which the viewer might find himself stuck. Her giant steel spiders, which teetered across the world from New York to St Petersburg to London’s Tate Modern, were both terrorising and protective. London’s, 35 feet tall, was called “Maman”.
With the art world in awe of her from 1982 onwards, when a New York retrospective drew her, very late in life, to popular attention, she got tired of explaining this or that protuberance in her landscapes of mounds and udders. Freud came in handy; she quoted him often. But claims of eroticism puzzled her. The shapes just suggested themselves, so she followed. They were all about pain, fear, demons and her past.
That, too, seemed a contradictory place. A comfortable middle-class upbringing south of Paris was presented as something close to child abuse; yet her first sculpture show, in New York in 1949 after she had married and left, was of tall, sad balsa-wood figures that represented “homesickness”. Her mother was not only a spider—a reference to her career as a weaver and repairer of tapestries—but a “She-Fox”, a huge-breasted creature of enduring stone squatting on haunches under which Louise tried to burrow, like a worm. Her father, handsome and philandering, was someone she longed to please; yet in 1974 an enormous tableau in plaster and latex, “The Destruction of the Father”, showed huge mammary forms round a table in a red-glowing cave on which the hated paterfamilias was torn up and devoured.
Even the gentle art of tapestry itself was transmuted into violence. In her works the spiralling spindle represented the beginning of chaos. The needle threatened the desecration of the stone, the penetration to the core. The twisting of the wet tapestries, lugged from the tannin-filled river, made Ms Bourgeois dream of twisting the neck of the plump English girl who had been her father’s mistress. Her childhood task in the workshop was to draw cartoons of the missing feet of figures; her mother, with delicate scissors, would snip out the genitals from tapestries destined for the puritan American market. Hence the liking for scattered body parts in latex, wax, bronze or marble, and the odd assemblages, such as “Nature Study” of 1984, where figures lacked heads but had multiple breasts, and phalluses, and claws.
From the volcano
She had claws herself. For years they went undetected. She attended the New York art shows on the arm of her art-historian husband, Robert Goldwater, like any smiling post-war wife, and brought up three sons placidly on huge bottles of milk, while thinking of the delicious fear induced by milk seeping from the mother, water from the earth, saliva from the snail, lava from the volcano. Her own “volcanic subconscious” was channelled into work done in wood, because it was quiet, or cobbled from objets trouvés, because she did not want to spend her husband’s money, and then hidden away, as a squirrel hid nuts, since art was a man’s world.
She believed this even in her last three celebrated decades. She was not a feminist particularly, but had seen enough of the power-games of the Duchamps and Bretons, the Pollocks and the Warhols. Some of her sculptures were of women trying to turn themselves into weapons. They remained fragile. She was not. Faced with a solid block—even the lovely curve of white marble that went to make “The Sail” in 1988—she needed to hack it to pieces, then rebuild it as she wanted. She raged to understand the stone. The more the material resisted, the more she fought it.
It was all about self-esteem, she said. She gained confidence by destroying the past. And if the finished work caused disquiet, as it usually did, that pleased her. She had connected with other people and attracted their regard, maybe their love. Isolation always haunted her. It lay behind the “Cells”, her series of installations in the early 1990s in which small, bleak rooms were viewed through half-opened doors or dirty windows. One contained a metal-framed bed in which someone was hiding. Another showed, beside a tray of perfume bottles, two stone hands twisted in pain.
Almost everything, she confessed, could be seen as a self-portrait. This was her, arching her body in a bronze hoop; her as a splayed, bug-eyed rabbit; her as a torso with orifices, like leaves, down her spine. And, yes, her being carried, tenderly as a doll, by an elderly woman in a monkey-fur coat with an impish, vicious smile
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