Louise Bourgeois: Suspension

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

SUSPENSION

CHEIM & READ

SKIRA

LOUISE BOURGEOIS SUSPENSION

Untitled, 1947, ink and charcoal on paper, 11 1/8 x 8 1/2 in (28.3 x 21.6 cm)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS SUSPENSION E S S AY B Y R OBER T PINC US -W I T T EN

C HEIM & R E A D NE W YOR K

ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN LB: Suspension, an exercise in Free Association I The psychoanalytical critique of the work of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is a hook from which the artist also depends. LB (to speed things along)—a famed analysand of a famous psychoanalyst, Henry Lowenfeld—was in treatment from 1952 through 1982, easing the depredations of an abused childhood—perhaps not quite what the current use of the term suggests—by goading her masochistic narcissism with fantasies of revenge upon her father. Thousands of drawings, prints and diary pages—accessories of a long analysis—were palliative to the ravages imposed by a phallocentric universe. Purists tend to reject the notion that art is therapeutic. LB most certainly did not.

Painting never satisfied LB despite early efforts along those lines and years of study in front populaire Paris with minor notables such as André Lhote and major ones such as Fernand Léger. But painting itself is too pleasing, too ingratiating.

Graphics were her thing—both as art print and written notation, the latter often of aphoristic terseness—cryptic, multivalent messages to herself that often suggest the very opposite of their ostensive meanings. In interpreting this hugely ranging body of material, LB has been fortunate. Donald Kuspit, Philip LarrattSmith and Mignon Nixon, are but three skilled psychoanalytically-oriented art historian/critics who have foregrounded her art, clarifying, in the degree that psychoanalysis can, the ambiguities built into LB’s writings and complex works of art. Kuspit notes that LB’s works “are journal entries in permanent form.” Or, “Like Picasso, art for Bourgeois was ‘autobiography,’ and her autobiographical writing often has quality of original poetry.” [Kuspit, “Louise Bourgeois in Psychoanalysis with Henry Lowenfeld,” in Philip Larratt-Smith, ed., Louise Bourgeois, The Return of the Repressed Volume I (London: Violette Editions, 2012), p. 18.]

A documentary film completed in 2007, the last in a trilogy devoted to the artist

by Brigitte Cornand, is a record of art world luminaries humoring the whims of a very old and mythically powerful artist by reading aloud from LB’s oddly poetic and intensely visual notebooks, agendas, and echolalia-like lists. To be sure, polite insincerity is warranted in the face of ruinous state. The artist was then ninetyseven. Small wonder, then, that one often sees the artist caught in a rictus of surprise attempting to decipher the meaning of her own revenant notions. Still, this unsettling shadow intrudes in no way upon a lifetime of work immeasurably potent on a succession of cadet generations. No need to float anew the names, mostly those of women, of Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Francesco Clemente, Hannah Wilke, Yayoi Kusama, Carolee Schneemann, to name but a few.

I knew LB for many years. She was opaque, taciturn, mistrustful—as her psychoanalytical exegetes agree—, her thorny impatience exaggerated by age, tragic experience of two world wars, hard displacement, vexed motherhood, and the affront of profound art world ostracism. Later in life, her Sunday Salons at her Chelsea home (plaster dust settled over everything) became an abattoir for flaying alive her many acolyte-like interlocutors—artists often generations younger—who had neither her range of experience nor her focused knowledge of Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich—you name it.

But, not to press on with this slightly ad Feminam tone (since there was also something rather sweet about LB), the real problem of LB’s work is that the Labyrinths, the Lairs, the Cells, the Breasts, the Dioramas, the Personages, the Spiders, the Janus series—to mention some of LB’s now renowned themes— simply mean too much. Not for her the rationalist quiddity, the unitary selfreferentiality of utopian abstraction. No, her work confronts and confounds, sprawls and engulfs. Informed by Surrealism—the modern movement expressly forbidden to the AbEx artists of the American mid-century (at least by the followers of Clement Greenberg, less so, those of Harold Rosenberg)—, male artists (mostly) tended to marginalize Bourgeois. No surprise there. The vexing purchase of Sleeping Figure, 1950, by Alfred Barr, MoMA’s great founding Director

for its collections, only rubbed their noses in it. Deborah Wye’s Retrospective for the Museum was still thirty-two years in the offing. That of the Tate/Pompidou was fifty-eight years ahead. Talk about Laughing Last.

Actually, by her own delighted admission, Barr’s prim detachment was rather a “turn on” for her, his Presbyterian parson’s mode mirroring that of the diffident Robert Goldwater, LB’s dry-humored husband, a distinguished art historian with whom, as an undergraduate, I studied in 1953. During the years of the Second World War and shortly thereafter, Professor Goldwater was the Editorin-Chief of the “Magazine of Art,” the very years that Abstract Expressionism came together, a coalescence his writings closely monitored. Primitivism and Symbolism were his primary intellectual bailiwicks. That Primitivism and Symbolism also deeply concern LB in no way places her in her husband’s shadow; arguably, it may well be he who toiled in her vineyard.

For all their gnomic and constructivist fascinations, the AbEx sculptors of Bourgeois’s generation—David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak, Ibram Lassaw to name a few (though perhaps diminished in stature today with the giant exception of David Smith)—would certainly be astonished at the high rank now accorded the prickly French/American artist. Back then (she arrived here in 1938), they all but snubbed her as the exponent of a disreputable, literary movement no matter how much of Surrealism’s spikiness, automatism and sexist themes had been absorbed into their purportedly pure forms.

Among the complex and social/domestic issues LB coded in her work, the ubiquitous twisting gesture of la torse is pre-eminent. It signifies the remorseless wringing of the neck of Sadie Gordon Richmond, little Louise’s governess and English tutor whom her father took as mistress, moving her into the family home, with Louise’s mother complicit in the creation of this new House of Atreides ménage. The Destr uction of the Father naturally ensues, the meta-narrative roiling just below the totality of Bourgeois’s oeuvre, and a 1974 performance work by the artist. “It is basically a table,” LB reminds us in an oft-cited recollection “… the awful, terrifying family dinner table headed by the father who sits and

gloats. And the others, the wife, the children, what can they do? They sit there, in silence. The mother of course tries to satisfy the tyrant … The children are full of exasperation … My father would get nervous looking at us, and he would explain to all of us what a great man he was. So, in exasperation, we grabbed the man, threw him on the table, dismembered him, and proceeded to devour him.” (Author’s emphasis, however superflous.)

[This version quoted from Centerpoint, A Jour nal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 3, no. 3/4, Fall/Spring 1980, p. 16.]

The anguishing death of her hated/beloved father’s death in 1951 and a harrowing HUAC inquiry hoping to finger Red sympathizers among the artist’s circle falls right within LB’s extended Personages series, spiraling works as much sculptures as totemic realities. The provocation built into a conflation of bourgeois and Bourgeois, of class and family name, surely comes into play here. Doubtless, psychoanalysis spared LB institutionalization, not to say suicide; the dicey game of self-murder always hovers as an obsessive theme at the edge of the artist’s liminal consciousness. The phallic polymorphism cherished by the artist may also be rooted in this passage though crisis. By 1968 the all-critical series of five hanging Janus sculptures emerge, a date not-incidentally contemporary with the rebellion in Paris of the Sorbonne students (where LB had, as a young woman, studied philosophy and mathematics) and the outspoken resistance of the American public to the continuing war in Vietnam.

Though recent Feminist history deeply questions Freud’s once sacrosanct scenarios—the Oedipus Complex, Orality versus Anality, Penis envy, The tripartite Ego, Id and Super-Ego, Neurosis born of infantile trauma, the Return of the Repressed—these famous postulates permitted LB to explore a range of cave-like, mucoid, polymorphous, urological and gynecological forms hitherto denied entry to canonic modernism. Like many sophisticated psychoanalytical adherents of her generation, LB first flirted with and then spurned the leftwing politics in the Thirties. While she continued to hold certain radical social views in the Forties,—think of the marching comb-like figure of The Blind Leading the Blind (1947–48), subsequently renamed, in 1979, C.O.Y.O.T.E. (Call Off Your

Old Tired Ethics), a work reflecting her views on the validity of prostitution—, she embraced the Freudian dispensation. Needless to say, Freudianism violently contrasts with a materialist Stalinism that sees art solely as propaganda; at least, Trotsky, like Freud, recognized the autonomy of art, a beauty floating free of the utilitarian needs of a waxing totalitarian state. Small wonder Stalin had Trotsky murdered and Freud excised from the Soviet syllabi. LB’s work is utterly useless as propaganda.

II A more austere approach is in order, a focus acknowledging the classicism underpinning our very fundamental notion of what sculpture is about in the first place. After all, it is the classical tradition that LB really subverted. Our classicist assumptions pitting the Real against the Ideal are deeply rooted. In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates, when speaking of the beauty of sounds that are clearly struck, also notes the beauty inherent to “straight lines and curves and the surfaces of solid forms produced out of these by lathes and rulers and squares.” Centuries of study have hardened this purist view into law, even into contemporary times.

Think Minimalism. But this platonic template implicitly belittled forms perceived as freakish or unruly. LB herself had first to suppress the classicism of the twenties and thirties in which she was trained to invent forms thought to be unpalatable and unclassifiable.

Though now occupying the high ground, a grand range of LB’s work still provides a kick in the eye that contravenes settled opinion, perhaps none more so that her suspended sculptures. Owing to the guileless, unapologetic simplicity of their presentation, we tend to ignore, not even register, that the works often turn idly in air. The engineered, inter-linked armature of hooks and pins typical of Alexander Calder’s Mobiles possess no psychological content, are all decorative.

LB’s dangling works, her “mobiles” so to speak, are all psychological content, are not decorative. So to praise Calder anew is really beside the point. (One could as easily drag the constructivist Mark de Suvero into this argument since several of his smaller sculptures employ an element that turns on a single point; still,

his forged steel is far too “heroic” to be swerved by mere air currents. Nor do they express any psychology—neither modesty nor shame. Again, nothing to do with LB.) For LB—suspended sculptures held aloft by a scarcely registered point of affixation—allows her works a concentrated jolt quite apart from the shocked recognition of what the sculpture might represent. Think of the decapitated bronze Arch of Hysteria (1993), the quadriplegic cloth version (2004) or the pregnant Femme (2005). All dangle from an umbilicus, a point of contact inescapably associated with birth—more properly, with the infant’s separation from a nourishing mother. They call to mind the perplexing omphalos, the navel of the world, a stone seemingly covered by a knotted net. The most famous is preserved at oracular Delphi. Legend has it that the titaness Rhea disguised her newborn son, Zeus, by wrapping the omphalos in swaddling clothes giving it to her consort, Cronus, who fearing filial usurpation, pointedly ate his children at birth. This Greek myth, met again as part of Freud’s Oedipal construct, inverts the scenario of LB’s signature parable, the The Destr uction of the Father. The artist confirms just how parentally coded the hanging works really are: “There was a grenier, an attic with exposed beams. It was very large and very beautiful. My father had a passion for fine furniture. All the sieges de bois were hanging up there. It was very pure. No tapestries, just the wood itself. You would look up and see these armchairs hanging in very good order. The floor was bare.

It was quite impressive. This is the origin of a lot of hanging pieces.”

[Louise Bourgeois, quoted in: “Self-Expression is Sacred and Fatal,” in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1992), p. 185.]

Or: “I am hanging on to my mother you are hanging on to the ceiling she is hanging on.”

[Louise Bourgeois, Diary entry, January 2, 1996.]

Conventionally sculpture is isolated on a plinth or base—a way of identifying the object as worthy of contemplation while cutting away the distractions of the world. The base, in this sense, is a signifier that plays the same role for tangible form that the frame does for painting—it ratifies the prestigious status of the form through its isolation. From the highly radicalized sixties, these conventions were deeply questioned as was sculpture’s encoding the vertical of the human upon the earth, sculpture as a surrogate human. At that moment, certain artists went so far as to insist that sculpture could be the very horizontal of the earth itself, could be walked upon like a carpet or a rug. Others saw that sculpture could be congruent with the base, could be the base itself—oblongs, rectangular solids, or cubes placed on the ground. These works of Minimalist persuasion—the names of Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, are the usual suspects—all echo a distant purist Platonism.

LB, by hanging the work in air from a single point—as well as in her rejection of the paradigm of the human vertical on the horizon as sculpture, or as the base as sculpture—discarded out of hand those indurated conventions. She notes that “Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape.

Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.”

[Louise Bourgeois, quoted in John Cheim and Jerry Gorovoy, eds., Louise Bourgeois Drawings (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, etc., 1988), p. 109.]

III Herself a virtual demiurge, LB’s tutelary Olympian is Rhea’s daughter, Hestia, goddess of home and hearth, of kitchen crafts, of saving and thrift and domestic cookery. For Bourgeois, this conjures an art of scullery slaughter, pots of plaster and mastic and the forming of reparative, prosthesis-like casts for broken limbs.

Think of the artificial leg of the bronze Henriette (1985), the stilt-like rubber Legs (1986) or the red cloth triptych, Legs (2001). In works such as Lair (1962) or Fée Couturière (1963) or The Quartered One (1964–65) their initial bandage-like origin is easily registered in their surface palpations and manipulations, even if certain of them were later cast in bronze—bronzes that in turn may be painted or patinated, bringing them back to their original white color. Once created, Louise

unapologetically hangs them—dangles them from single line of variable length depending on the surface from which the work depends.

“Recall

space

up and down—

is experienced through loathing—As a sculpture I used to experience it as a wish or need to create a certain form or direction[…] loathing of the floor—wish to hang things and see hanging things (drawings of hanging sheathes whole series) floating objects. drawing of clouds— in opposition to cave—” [Louise Bourgeois, September 13, 1957. Loose sheet: 10 ½ x 8 in. LB–0219 (excerpt).]

It is all unimpeded, simplicity itself. The system floats free of governing rules.

LB hangs her work—the metaphor of the scaffold is ever present—from wires or cords no matter the scale of the sculpture, be it massive and unwieldy or small and light. Their formality or iconography is never rationalized or justified—nor is their linguistic, or aesthetic content. Just grab her, throttle her, hang her. The sculptor as serial killer. Untrammelled will prevails, the drive to liberate art from settled good taste or received opinion. LB creates her own settled good taste, flatters no external taste, conciliates no opinion but imposes her own will instead.

She signals no specific length for the wires or cords—or rope. Just tie the noose, yet another torse. Lengths are variables, functions of ceiling height, the variables of suicide or murder. It is also the most direct expression of suspension. Suspense.

LB remains a little girl looking up. “[…] I want to hang things and to see them hanging I am conscious of the height and look for possibilities there. and I sit on a high chair.”

[Louise Bourgeois, September 13–14, 1957. Loose sheet: 10 ½ x 8 in. LB–0136 (excerpt).]

Arguably, the most arresting hanging works are those that derive from the series of Janus sculptures. Janus is the familiar double-faced god of Roman myth and pagan faith—he looks forward to the future (hence, our month of January) and backward to the past. The most distinctly Janus-like work is the Hanging Janus (1968)—its penile character all but explicit in its abbreviated shaft, its glans covered by a turban-like foreskin, a form ending in a blunt meatus—one penis mirroring the other. It’s no particular feat of grand imagining to associate the word “penis” and “Janus.” Both are short, bi-syllabic words. Their second stress— the “is” and the “us”—strike the ear closely.

[Perhaps English rather than French is helpful here as the past participle of the infinitive of our verb “to hang” has a crude connotation in English slang. Nor should schoolboy hilarity at hearing the word “anus” hidden in the god’s name be forgotten—or in the name of yet another god, Uranus. LB, after all, was mother of three boys].

The Janus (1968), in dark and polished bronze is particularly dismaying in that the penile forms while mirroring one another are also torn apart, rent as it were, painful of prodding. This is also the case of the Janus Fleuri (1968), its shy scale not especially mollified by gold patination. Indeed, the patina has a way of underscoring the attraction/repulsion mechanism built into the fetish—that of being drawn to something even as one is repelled. Robert Storr, in writing about this work, notes that “two such phalluses while ‘looking’ in opposite directions” also may be read as "two breasts hinged on swollen labia” as it has the effect of rendering “the inert fleshiness of the latter piece androgynous in ways wide open to symbiotic analysis.”

[Robert Storr, “Abstraction, l’Esprit Geometrique” in Louise Bourgeois (United Kingdom: Tate Publishing, 2007), p. 30.]

The Hanging Janus with Jacket (1968) also corresponds to this inflamed terrain, its “jacket” demarcating a broader genital area. In connoting both male and female— the jacket becoming, as it were, an incipient Mons Veneris as well as the shaped rise of pubic hair—Hanging Janus with Jacket also reminds us of the organic genital development, the binding of penis to clitoris, the one a parallel structure

to the other. Similarly, the delicate protective sheathes of the vaginal labia may be regarded as formal kin to the foreskin. These works strike a hermaphroditic note. Hermaphroditus, the beautiful androgynous son of Hermes and Aphrodite.

Where is LB in that unique parentage of beauty and Zeus’s son, thief/messenger of the gods?

The duality possible to the reading of the human genital structure is a paradox of which LB is deeply protective. Think of the Fillette sculptures of 1968 here represented by the Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968–99). That “little girl” that Bourgeois carries under her arm appears in slightly more aggressive version in the famous photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe—a “little girl” as penis. That the latter Fillette is made of pigmented urethane rubber further underscores its fetishized nature—rubber being (along with leather) among the most fetishized of substances—however trite—of the modern erotic repertory.

Perhaps the only parallel to the possible vaginal readings of Bourgeois’s Janus works—and the Fillettes too—are those rare Anthropométries of c. 1960 by Yves Klein, transfers that register the female model’s genital area. However, in the Anthropométries, the delicacy of the labial traceries tends to be lost owing to the recessed female pubic area and the obscuring effect of the pubic hair. Still, in certain Anthropométries, near-moth or butterfly configurations do appear—rather the opposite of the torn, inflamed fleshiness of the vaginas of which Storr took note. In turn, these wing-like configurations, in modest measure, recall the shield-like jacket of the Hanging Janus with Jacket sculpture.

IV The later works of the artist—she was well into her nineties at the time—became radically more figurative—and rather juju like—especially when hung as talisman or amulet upon a fine chain. This figuration remains sensible even in swirling works of a seemingly Futurist excitement. The Couple (2002) in aluminum and the even more violently spinning aluminums of 2004 convey a skeining turbulence traceable to the stolid, sewn, doll-like figures of the early years of the present

century, works such as the sewn Couple (2001). Even the comparatively large, cast and polished furiously whirling Couple (2007–09) refers as much to those hand sewn figures as to the hanks and skeins of wool dangling in the parental atelier.

The large body of sewn works of the latter phase of LB’s production easily reference a childhood spent in suburban Antony where her parents ran an important workshop for the repair of French tapestries of the highest quality— Sewing and dyeing, Sewing and Dying. The repair and restoration of woven cloth became as second nature to Bourgeois. Tapestries were washed in the Bièvre, their colored dyes set in the waters of that dank river. Not only was the fiber twisted (that is, was Sadie strangled), so was the blood occasioned by the slaughter of a tyrannical father (along with his aggrandizing mistress) diluted and washed away.

LB as Elektra. A film noir account of murder ever lurks in a background that clarifies the artist’s affection for the spider, arch emblem of LB’s late years. The spider is the weaver par excellence—a maternal insect that protects her eggs even as she spins, builds and repairs her web, her very own tapestry.

Such self-absorbed insights allowed Bourgeois to forefront a range of forms far beyond the overly-familiar geometries sanctioned by an arguably passé high modernism. Hestia and the Chthonic deities hidden deep in the mind proved far more fateful spurs to LB’s innovation than our ever present and familiar Platonism. But, it is also true that the most seemingly eccentric forms—if sufficiently encountered—eventually settle comfortably in the eye. That Fashion begins as beautiful and then becomes ugly while Art begins as ugly and then becomes beautiful is a touchstone of modernist orthodoxy. Kissed by a loving princess, the beast becomes a handsome prince; or, as in a mirror, the sleeping beauty awakens when kissed by a handsome prince.

Lair, 1962, bronze, painted white, 9 1/2 x 10 x 9 in (24.1 x 25.4 x 22.9 cm)

Untitled, 1947, ink and charcoal on paper, 11 x 8 3/4 in (27.9 x 22.2 cm)

FÊe Couturière, 1963, bronze, painted white, 39 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 22 1/2 in (100.3 x 57.2 x 57.2 cm)

The Quartered One, 1964–6, bronze, black patina, 62 1/4 x 24 x 20 in (158.1 x 61 x 50.8 cm)

Hanging Janus, 1968, bronze, dark and polished patina, 6 7/8 x 11 x 6 1/4 in (17.5 x 27.9 x 15.9 cm)

Hanging Janus with Jacket, 1968, bronze, dark and polished patina, 10 5/8 x 20 5/8 x 6 3/8 in (27 x 52.4 x 16.2 cm)

Janus, 1968, bronze, dark and polished patina, 10 x 13 x 7 in (25.4 x 33 x 17.8 cm)

Janus Fleuri, 1968, bronze, gold patina, 10 1/8 x 12 1/2 x 8 3/8 in (25.7 x 31.8 x 21.3 cm)

Fillette (Sweeter Version), 1968–99, pigmented urethane rubber, 23 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 7 3/4 in (59.7 x 26.7 x 19.7 cm)

Henriette, 1985, bronze, 60 x 13 x 12 in (152.4 x 33 x 30.5 cm)

Lair, 1986, rubber, 43 x 21 x 21 in (109.2 x 53.3 x 53.3 cm)

Legs, 1986, rubber, 120 1/2 x 3 x 8 3/4 in (306 x 7.6 x 22.2 cm) and 121 3/4 x 3 x 8 in (309.2 x 7.6 x 20.3 cm)

Arch of Hysteria, 1993, polished bronze, 33 x 40 x 23 in (83.8 x 101.6 x 58.4 cm)

Hanging Figure, 2000, drypoint on cloth, 10 x 10 in (25.4 x 25.4 cm)

Femme, 1993, bronze, 11 x 6 x 4 1/4 in (27.9 x 10.8 x 11.4 cm)

Untitled, 1995, fabric, 20 x 7 1/2 x 6 in (50.8 x 19.1 x 15.2 cm)

Single I, 1996, fabric, 84 x 52 x 16 in (213.4 x 132.1 x 40.6 cm)

Couple, 2001, fabric, 19 x 6 x 6 1/2 in (48.3 x 15.2 x 16.5 cm)

Hanging (To Life) on a Thread, 2002, red ink and pencil on music paper, 8 5/8 x 12 in (21.9 x 30.5 cm)

Legs, 2001, fabric, 76 x 34 x 22 1/2 in (193 x 86.4 x 57.2 cm)

The Couple, 2002, aluminum, 15 x 9 x 5 in (38.1 x 22.9 x 12.7 cm)

Arch of Hysteria, 2004, fabric, 5 x 20 1/4 x 9 in (12.7 x 51.4 x 22.9 cm)

Untitled, 2004, aluminum, 65 1/2 x 42 x 25 in (166.4 x 106.7 x 63.5 cm)

Untitled, 2004, aluminum, 72 x 42 x 46 in (182.9 x 106.7 x 116.8 cm)

Untitled, 2004, fabric, 20 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 10 in (52.1 x 21.6 x 25.4 cm)

Femme, 2005, bronze, silver nitrate patina, 13 x 16 1/2 x 7 3/4 in (33 x 41.9 x 19.7 cm)

The Birth, 2007, gouache on paper, 23 1/2 x 18 in (59.7 x 45.7 cm)

Cinq, 2007, fabric and stainless steel, 24 x 14 x 14 in (61 x 35.6 x 35.6 cm)

The Couple, 2007–09, cast and polished aluminum, 61 x 30 x 26 in (154.9 x 76.2 x 66 cm)

CHRONOLOGY 1911 Louise Joséphine Bourgeois is born in Paris, on December 25th, to Joséphine Valerie Fauriaux Bourgeois and Louis Isadore Bourgeois. The family, which includes her older sister Henriette Marie Louise, has a tapestry gallery at 174 Boulevard Saint-Germain.

1912 The Bourgeois family rents a house in Choisy-le-Roi, outside of Paris, until 1917.

1913 Pierre Joseph Alexandre, Louise’s brother, is born on January 24th.

1915–1918 Bourgeois’s father, Louis, and his brother Desiré, are mobilized to fight in World War I. Desiré is killed the first week of the war. Louis Bourgeois is wounded in 1916 and brought to a hospital in Chartres, where Louise and her mother visit him. Desiré’s wife Madeleine and her two sons, Jacques and Maurice, move in with the Bourgeois family. At the end of World War I, Louise’s mother Joséphine contracts the Spanish Flu. 1919 In May 1919, the Bourgeois family acquires a property in Antony, a suburb of Paris.

1921 Louise enrolls in the prestigious Lycée Fénelon in Paris, which she will attend until 1927, and again in 1932. Her education will be interrupted over the next several years in order to care for her mother.

1922 As Joséphine Bourgeois’s condition worsens, the family begins to spend winter months in warmer climates, and summer months in Antony.

In November, Sadie Gordon Richmond is hired by Louis Bourgeois to teach English to the Bourgeois children. She becomes his mistress and lives with the family periodically until 1932.

1923 At the age of twelve, Bourgeois is asked to use her drawing skills to help out in the tapestry workshop. She becomes an expert at drawing legs and feet.

The Bourgeois family rents the Villa Marcel in Le Cannet for the winter months. Louise attends the Lycée International in Cannes.

1929 Bourgeois takes drawing lessons at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, and begins studying English at the Berlitz School in Nice.

1930 Bourgeois continues to study English at the Berlitz School, and studies math, physics, and chemistry at the École Universelle by correspondence.

1932 Bourgeois travels to Scandinavia and Russia during the summer.

Louise Bourgeois with a sculpture in progress, c. 1964

Bourgeois’s mother Joséphine dies on September 14th.

Bourgeois receives her baccalaureate in philosophy from Lycée Fénelon on October 29th, and enters the Sorbonne in November, studying solid geometry and differential calculus.

1933 Depressed by the death of her mother, Bourgeois abandons the study of mathematics and begins to study art. Over the next several years, she studies in various art schools and artists’ ateliers in Montparnasse and Montmartre, including the Académie d'Espagnat; the atelier of Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson; the École du Louvre; the École des Beaux-Arts with Devambez and Colarossi; the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Othon Friesz in painting and Wlérick in sculpture; the Académie Julian; and the Académie Scandinavie with Charles Despiau, who was Auguste Rodin's assistant.

Bourgeois exhibits a painting at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon des Artistes Français.

1934 At the suggestions of her teacher Paul Colin, Bourgeois makes a second trip to Russia, this time to see the Moscow Theater and the work of the Russian Constructivists.

1936–1938 Bourgeois is a massière at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the studio of Yves Brayer.

She also studies under Marcel Gromaire and André Lhote, and becomes a fully certified docent at the Louvre. In addition, Bourgeois studies with Fernand Léger who suggests that her sensibility leans more towards the three dimensional.

Bourgeois exhibits at the Galerie de Paris in the “Exposition de L’Atelier de la Grande Chaumière,” and with the Ranson group at Galerie Jean Dufresse in the exhibition “La Groupe 1938–1939.”

1938 Bourgeois partitions off part of her father’s tapestry gallery at 174 Boulevard Saint-Germain and opens her own art gallery dealing in prints and paintings by Delacroix, Matisse, Redon, Valadon and Bonnard. There she meets Robert Goldwater, an American art historian who is in Paris doing research for his doctoral thesis “Primitivism in Modern Painting.” They marry on September 12th in Paris.

In October, Bourgeois moves to New York City with Robert Goldwater.

1939 Bourgeois enrolls at the Art Students League in New York City, studying with Vaclav Vytlacil, and will work there until 1945. She begins making prints and starts to exhibit in the United States.

Bourgeois and Goldwater return to France to arrange for the adoption of Michel Olivier, an orphan, who was born in Margaux near Bordeaux in 1936.

1940 Michel Olivier arrives in New York on May 21st.

Jean-Louis Thomas Bourgeois is born to Bourgeois and Goldwater on July 4th.

1941 Alain Mathieu Clément Bourgeois, their third son, is born on November 12th.

1945 Bourgeois has her first solo show, “Paintings by Louise Bourgeois,” at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City. She begins exhibiting paintings in group shows with the Abstract Expressionists, among artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, and is included in the group show “The Women” at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York City.

With the help of Marcel Duchamp, Bourgeois curates “Documents, France 1940–1944: ArtLiterature-Press of the French Underground” at the Norlyst Gallery.

Bourgeois exhibits for the first time at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in the “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting,” in which she is represented nearly every year until 1952.

1946 Bourgeois makes prints at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York City. Other members of the workshop are Nemesio Antúnez, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Le Corbusier.

1947 For her second solo exhibition, Bourgeois exhibits seventeen paintings at Norlyst Gallery in New York City. Her Femme Maison image is used as the announcement with a quote by Nemesio Antúnez.

1949 “Louise Bourgeois, Recent Work 1947–1949: Seventeen Standing Figures in Wood,” the artist’s first solo exhibition of sculpture, is presented at the Peridot Gallery in New York City.

1950 Bourgeois has a second exhibition, “Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures,” at the Peridot Gallery.

Robert Goldwater receives a Fulbright Scholarship, and in October the family returns to France for an extended stay.

1951 One of Bourgeois’s wood personage sculptures, Sleeping Figure (1950), is acquired by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Bourgeois’s father passes away on April 9th. The family returns to America in September.

Suffering from depression, Bourgeois begins psychoanalysis.

1953 Bourgeois has her third and last solo show at the Peridot Gallery entitled “Louise Bourgeois: Drawings for Sculpture and Sculpture.” Bourgeois also participates in group shows at the Stable Gallery and the Poindexter Gallery, and exhibits in the Annuals of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1953 to 1957.

In June, the Bourgeois-Goldwater family departs for Europe. They visit Bourges, Aubusson, Aix, Magagnose and the caves at Lascaux, as well as Italy.

1956 The Whitney Museum of American Art acquires the sculpture One and Others (1955).

1957 Bourgeois becomes an American citizen on March 11th.

1960 Bourgeois starts experimenting with organic materials, such as plastic, latex and rubber.

In May, her brother Pierre dies at an insane asylum in Villejuif, France.

1964 After a hiatus of eleven years, Bourgeois exhibits a new body of work, “Louise Bourgeois: Recent Sculpture,” at the Stable Gallery. The Rose Fried Gallery simultaneously presents a solo show of works on paper, “Recent Drawings by Louise Bourgeois.”

1966 Lucy Lippard organizes the exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. Bourgeois’s work is shown with a younger generation of artists, such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman.

Bourgeois and Goldwater attend First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. They also travel to the Ivory Coast and Kano, Nigeria.

1967–1968 Bourgeois makes her first trip to Pietrasanta, Italy to work in marble and bronze. She will return regularly to work in Pietrasanta until 1972.

1973 The Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris acquires the white marble Cumul I (1969), which will be transferred to the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1976.

Bourgeois’s husband Robert Goldwater dies on March 26th.

1974 Bourgeois exhibits at the alternative space called 112 Greene Street. Entitled “Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture 1970–1974,” the show includes the installation The Destruction of the Father (1974).

1977 Bourgeois receives an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from Yale University.

1978 Bourgeois exhibits the installation Confrontation (1978) at the Hamilton Gallery of Contemporary Art in New York City. Her performance, “A Banquet: A Fashion Show of Body Parts,” is presented inside the installation where models parade while wearing latex costumes.

The Berkeley Art Museum of the University of California mounts “Louise Bourgeois: Matrix / Berkeley 17.”

The Blind Leading the Blind (1947–49) is purchased by the Detroit Institute of Art.

Untitled, 1946, ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in (21.6 x 27.9 cm)

1980 Bourgeois travels to New Orleans to receive the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts at the National Women’s Caucus for Art conference.

Bourgeois acquires a studio in Brooklyn that allows her to work at a much larger scale.

Curated by Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois exhibits in “10 Abstract Sculptures: American and European 1940–1980” at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York City. From the exhibition, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra acquires C.O.Y.O.T.E. (1947–48).

Bourgeois’s older sister Henriette dies on July 9th.

1981 The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago organizes the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison.”

Bourgeois travels to Carrara, Italy to work on a series of marble sculptures.

1982 “Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective” opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The exhibition, curated by Deborah Wye, is the first retrospective given to a female artist at the museum. The show travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Akron Art Museum in Ohio.

1983 Bourgeois is awarded the Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. She is elected as a Member of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City. Bourgeois also receives an Honorary Doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

1985 Maeght-Lelong, in Paris, exhibits “Louise Bourgeois: Retrospective 1947–1984.”

1988 In October, Bourgeois travels again to Italy, where she begins a series of works in pink marble with inscriptions that wrap around their rough-hewn bases.

1989 Organized by Peter Weiermair, Bourgeois has her first European retrospective at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, “Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective Exhibition.” The show travels to the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, the Fundación Tapies in Barcelona, the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Kröller-Muller Museum in Otterlo.

1990 Bourgeois’s son Michel passes away on April 27th.

1991 Cell I (1991) through Cell VI (1991), are shown at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

The exhibition is organized by Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis.

Bourgeois is the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International

Sculpture Center in Washington DC. She is awarded the Grand Prix in sculpture by the French Ministry of Culture.

1992 Bourgeois exhibits Precious Liquids (1992) at Documenta IX, which is subsequently purchased

by Dominique Bozo for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Bourgeois presents an installation at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia entitled “She Lost It.” It includes a performance piece, which incorporates the wrapping of a 5.5-meter-length cloth silkscreened with a text from 1947, A Man and Woman Lived Together.

1993 Bourgeois represents the United States at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. An expanded version of the exhibition, “The Locus of Memory” is organized by Charlotta Kotik at the Brooklyn Museum and travels from there to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg; and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.

Mayor David Dinkins of New York City presents Bourgeois the “Mayor’s Awards for Art & Culture.”

1994 “Louise Bourgeois: Print Retrospective” takes place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The show travels to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe Originale in Gravelines, France; The Museum of Modern Art in Oxford; and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht.

1995 Marie-Laure Bernadac organizes “Louise Bourgeois: Pensées-plumes” at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which travels to the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland.

The MARCO in Monterrey, Mexico mounts “Louise Bourgeois” which travels to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville, and to the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City.

Bourgeois receives the 1995 Biennial Award from the Royal Museum in Tokyo and the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa-ken, Japan. She is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago.

1996 Bourgeois is included in the São Paulo Bienal, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff and Jerry Gorovoy.

1997 The National Medal of Arts is presented to Bourgeois by President Clinton at the White House. Her son Jean-Louis Bourgeois accepts the award on her behalf.

1998 The Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux mounts “Louise Bourgeois,” curated by MarieLaure Bernadac. The show travels to the Foundation Belem in Lisbon, the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

1999 The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University awards Bourgeois the Wexner Prize. She also receives the 1999 Praemium Imperiale Award in the sculpture category from the Japan Art Association.

Curated by Jerry Gorovoy and Danielle Tilkin, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte / Reina Sofia in Madrid mounts the retrospective exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Architecture and Memory.”

2000 Bourgeois is commissioned for the inaugural installation at Turbine Hall of Bankside Power Station, opening as the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London. Bourgeois displays a 30-foot steel and marble Spider called Maman (1999) and three steel architectural towers called I Do, I Undo and I Redo (1999–2000) that employ the use of staircases and mirrors and incorporate fabric and marble sculptures within the interiors.

2001 Curated by Julie Sylvester, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg mounts a Bourgeois retrospective, their first exhibition ever of a living American artist. It travels to the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, the Museet for Samtidskunst in Oslo, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.

Organized by the Public Art Fund, the 30-foot bronze Spider sculpture Maman (1999) and two 11-foot Spider sculptures (1996) are installed in New York City’s Rockefeller Center.

2002 The Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria exhibits a retrospective exhibition of Bourgeois’s drawings, along with sculpture. The exhibition travels to the Zacheta Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland and to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany.

Bourgeois is represented in Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany.

2003 Bourgeois is honored with the Wolf Prize in the Arts for Painting and Sculpture by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. She also receives an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Champaign, IL. Organized by Frances Morris, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin presents “Louise Bourgeois: Stitches In Time.” The exhibition travels to the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and the Center of Contemporary Art in Málaga, Spain.

2005 Bourgeois’s two new hanging aluminum sculptures, each called Untitled (2004), along with a new variation of the sound piece C’est Le Murmure De L’eau Qui Chante (2001–5) are included in the 51st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in Venice, Italy.

2007–2009 The Tate Modern in London organizes a Bourgeois Retrospective in collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.

2008 The French Legion of Honor medal is presented by President Sarkozy to Louise Bourgeois at the artist’s Chelsea home.

Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach complete their film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine which combines interviews of the Artist in her studio and home over the course of more than a decade with views of Bourgeois exhibitions and installations around the world.

2008–2009 The Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples exhibits sixty of Bourgeois’s works, spanning her career, juxtaposed with the paintings and objects of their own antique and prestigious permanent collection, “Louise Bourgeois for Capodimonte.”

2010 The Fondazione Vedova in Venice exhibits a retrospective installation, “Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Drawings,” curated by Germano Celant. The exhibition travels to inaugurate Hauser & Wirth’s new Savile Row space in London, and will be installed in an abbreviated version the following year at Cheim & Read in New York.

Bourgeois creates an installation entitled The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved (2007– 2010) in Vardo, Norway in collaboration with the architect Peter Zumthor. The project is dedicated to the victims of the 17th century witch hunt, and is unveiled in June 2011.

Louise Bourgeois dies on May 31st.

2011 Based on Bourgeois’s own writings composed during more than thirty years of psychoanalysis, Philip Larratt-Smith organizes an exhibition at the Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires, “Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed,” which travels to the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.

The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa mounts a fifteen-month-long show, “Louise Bourgeois Homage.” Included are a group of Bourgeois’s early wood Personage sculptures installed directly into the floor without their bases, inspired by the artist’s first solo show at New York City’s Peridot Gallery in 1949.

The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel presents an exhibition curated by Ulf Küster of Bourgeois’s works titled “Louise Bourgeois: À L’Infini,” including sculptures from every decade of her career juxtaposed with works by Modern Masters from the Beyeler Collection.

2012 The Qatar Museums Authority Gallery in Doha installs “Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious,” curated by Philip Larratt-Smith. It is the first survey in the Middle East of the work of Louise Bourgeois.

2012–2013 Faurschou Beijing mounts Bourgeois’s first exhibition in China, “Louise Bourgeois: Alone and Together,” which travels to the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen. The Beijing installation receives the Award of Art China (ACC) naming Bourgeois as the most influential overseas artist in China in 2013.

2013–2014 The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh exhibits “ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois, A Woman Without Secrets.” This is the first display of a new collection of works by the artist, placed on long-term loan by Anthony d’Offay and the Artist Rooms Foundation.

The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh shows three large scale suites in “Louise Bourgeois: I Give Everything Away.”

2014 Curated by Jerry Gorovoy, Hauser & Wirth in Zurich exhibits “L’Araignée et Les Tapisseries,” the most comprehensive overview of Bourgeois’s tapestry works to date.

2014–2015 Cheim & Read in New York mounts an exhibition of the artist’s hanging sculpture, “Louise Bourgeois: Suspension,” curated by John Cheim.

Robert Pincus-Witten, Prof. Emeritus in Art History at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York is the scholar/critic whose numerous essays published throughout the sixties and seventies denominated the style called Postminimalism. In Bourgeois Tr uth (Robert Miller Gallery, December, 1982), Pincus-Witten first revealed the determining role of Sadie, the mistress of Louise Bourgeois’s father, to the biographical and formal meanings of Bourgeois’s art. Subsequently, in his essay, Circa1970 (Cheim & Read, 2007) he compared the work of Bourgeois with that of Lynda Benglis, but one of a phalanx of much younger artists on whose work Bourgeois was powerfully influential. Today, as a Contributing Editor of Artforum, he continues to chronicle art world events in his monthly reviews.

First published in Italy in 2014 by Skira editore S.p.A. Palazzo Casati Stampa via Torino 61 20123 Milano Italy www.skira.net Louise Bourgeois’s art, writings and archival material are © The Easton Foundation, licensed by VAGA, NY/SIAE, Rome All rights reserved by Cheim & Read, New York © 2014 Robert Pincus-Witten for his essay © 2014 Christopher Burke for art photography © 2014 Skira editore All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed and bound in Italy. First edition ISBN: 978-88-572-2589-0 (Cheim & Read) ISBN: 978-88-572-2588-3 (Skira editore) Distributed in USA, Canada, Central & South America by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 300 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, USA. Distributed elsewhere in the world by Thames and Hudson Ltd., 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX, United Kingdom.

Print ed on the occasion of the 2014 Cheim & Read exhibition

LOUISE BOURGEOIS SUSPENSION

Text Robert Pincus-Witten Design John Cheim Editor Ellen Robinson

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Jerry Gorovoy and Wendy Williams of The Easton Foundation

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

SUSPENSION

CHEIM & READ

SKIRA

LOUISE BOURGEOIS SUSPENSION