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.