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A Girl's Guilt
John Haberin New York City
Louise Bourgeois: Freud's Daughter and Prints
The Guilty Girl Is Fragile. With her sculpture from 2001, Louise Bourgeois is looking back a long way—to her childhood and the course of a troubled life. Such is the power of art and psychoanalysis.
Are the two synonymous? They are for the Jewish Museum when it speaks of her as "Freud's Daughter." Do not, though, sell her short. She may look fragile, with a small mouth, beady eyes, and a pink fabric like a sock covering a triangle for her cartoon head. Still, that triangle is anything but fragile, in lead with a base of steel. A retrospective with little place for her art can only sell her short, but her ghosts refuse to go away. 
For many an artist, words are suspect, especially when they try to account for art. Bourgeois felt the same way, and it cast doubt as well on psychotherapy. How can anyone talk one's way to a new life? She continued anyway, and the museum relies on a mountain of her words, in which she grapples with raw emotions and mixed feelings. "I want to say" and "to tell," but also "to forget," and "I want it now." Still, she had lasted well into her nineties by the time of My Inner Life, a print just two years before her death in 2010.
With Bourgeois, the enigma of American sculpture persists to this day in her prints. "My mother was right. Suffer and die." It sounds like a final plea from the heart, from a woman long past the need for compromise. Not that this artist was ever one to compromise, and MoMA had every right two years ago to call more than two hundred and fifty prints from its collection "An Unfolding Portrait." For all her words, a better sense of the artist might well begin there.
Awakening to chaos
Many a retrospective opens with a work that kicks right back at the viewer and sums up a career. The Jewish Museum opens with words and never lets them go. Wall text promises to explore an artist's "complex and unresolved relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis." Other museums have proposed art as therapy, but not like this. The text then introduces her as a wife, a mother of three, and a troubled daughter. It introduces, too, her depression and her therapist, Henry Lowenfeld.
He is only the first of many father figures to come. Born in 1911 in Paris, Louise Bourgeois learned Surrealism at first hand from André Breton, its poet and arbiter. Marcel Duchamp taught her to confront art itself with strange juxtapositions and radically altered materials—like that pink fabric as a meager stand-in for human warmth and human flesh. She married Robert Goldwater, an art professor with a command of "primitive art," and moved to New York. Her marble Portrait of Robert took her from 1969 to 1981, and it has more arms than an octopus. Even loving relationships can be strangling.
Bourgeois got an early boost from Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art—and then there is Sigmund Freud. His words high on the opening wall dwarf hers just below, as they will several more times in the show. The glare of direct lighting in darkened rooms adds drama but makes them both hard to read. By far the most words, though, leave those father figures behind. The show is the first to rely on a huge archive of notes to everyone, no one, or just herself. Dozens of framed sheets hang throughout.
It is difficult, exhausting reading. Her cursive is legible enough, and she is obsessive enough that the few dense pages of typewritten text are no easier. Now and then, too, she writes in French. As in her art, she borrows whatever she can, including letterhead from the Yale Registry for Nurses on (rest assured) Manhattan's Upper East Side. Therapists today have praised and lamented virtual sessions during Covid-19, with the patient stuck at home, but free of distracting everyday incidents. Bourgeois has no agenda from the start apart from her anger, her guilt, and her fears.
She has plenty of each, and they are inseparable. She speaks of a "guilty conscience," because of an overriding "will to kill." It appears in art with Dagger Child from the late 1940s, a bronze totem in the shape of a spear. It returns in Knife Woman of 1970, remade in 2002 with an equally mangled woman and a literal found knife. "I have to stay in bed so as not to get angry," she writes, but it is already too late. "I awake to revenge, aggression, rage, and chaos."
There is always the chance, too, that she might turn that anger on herself. She keeps returning to the suicidal impulse as something that she has finally overcome—which alone is a sign that she has not. She has, after all, to cope with her "furious moral dignity" on top of a " 'crumpling' physical dignity," and she has her fears. A long list of them includes silence, the dark, and emptiness, and one can imagine the physical presence of art as her bulwark against them. She asks what she is missing and replies "nothing," but that cuts both ways. Nothing can also mean what "always will be missing," the "experience of emptiness."
Retribution
In the mid-1950s, just when the New York School made abstract painting the triumph of American art, Bourgeois was not going along. She was no longer painting, and she all but quit making sculpture as well for several years, at an age when many an artist is just hitting her stride. She had just lost her father, too, her depression deepened, and she entered her most intense phase of therapy. When she returned to art, she could not only sustain her Surrealism, but also find a new place for her frightening spareness in a time of Minimalism. She has my favorite work in the hallowed halls of Minimalism, her gigantic spider at Dia:Beacon. This show looks instead at the words breaking the silence.
Should it have been left to a book? Others have done far better when it comes to her work, including surveys at MoMA in 1982 and the Guggenheim in 2008. My review back then already had to grapple with her Freudian side, and I can only refer you there. She found her greatest affinity with Freud, I argued, in her belief in repetition as a marker of impulse. "Always go back to the work you have on hand," she wrote. "Perfect and revisit again." Then, too, for all her ambivalence, I have also argued for why art takes words.
The curator, Philip Larratt-Smith with Shira Backer, insists on her struggle with her father, but what Bourgeois feared most from her anger was her "mother's retribution." Her mother had fallen ill when she was a small child, and she had to nurse her mother through her teens until her mother died. Found glass from 1990 recalls the folk medicine of cupping jars, placed on her mother's skin to suck out the bad stuff. They look like candlestick holders set in black stone. In a self-portrait from 1947, the woman in her mid-thirties becomes once again a child, but with her head expanding into a faceless black cloud. Long before her father's death, she already had her art, her anger, her guilt, and her fears.
The show can add to a picture of her art, with two full-scale installations most in touch with those fears. It cannot include more familiar work, when she was not in therapy, or her peak years in therapy, when she was not making art. It can only look back, like that fragile Guilty Girl. It has way too much stuffed fabric—although a large black form from 1997 resolves brilliantly into a limp headless couple clinging together for sex or for life. Bourgeois was one step ahead of the museum when she titled a gilded bronze from 1967, with the illusion of crumpled fabric, The End of Softness.
In the installations, though, her father is with her once again. The two cages of Passage Dangereux, from 1997, look like a century-old laboratory, dangers intact. They contain fragments of bones, bare sticks for legs, and no end of plain wood chairs. Her father's shirt cuffs serve as wrist restraints for torture or electrocution. And earlier, in 1974, she defied her guilt with The Destruction of the Father. Resinous white blobs set into the wall glow with the red of a fiery furnace.
Is her father in hell for his affairs even as her mother was dying, or has she put him through hell? Must she say, like Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost, "I myself am hell"? Bourgeois knows when she is making an impact on everyone but herself. "It will get worse," she writes, and "you accomplish nothing." And, after a blank line and an indent, "Then of course you despair." As for her greatness and her influence, you will just have to look elsewhere.
Your mother should know
Ma mère avait raison, it runs in French, just outside the entrance to Bourgeois prints. Souffrir et mourir. She shows a standing nude with a big belly, swept up in lighter curves—never entirely comfortable in her own body, but also never once willing to prettify it or to disown it. She is smiling way too much to play victim, not to mention too busy observing her surroundings and making art. By a show's end at MoMA, she has become a female Saint Sebastian with a big butt. The arrows that pierce the first Christian martyr are the least of her problems, and anyway they come from her.
Who knew that she had her mother in mind with her spiders and Femme Maison ("house woman")—and not her fears? Yet she insisted that spiders take care in weaving, and her mother kept a tidy home. Then again, the spider is as scary as ever, and the mother who told her to suffer and die sounds pretty scary, too. A homebody can be homey or cut off from the world, and art for Bourgeois can an act of self-assertion or a nightmare. Better still, it can be both, just as the spider's legs can morph into the tendrils of her hair. As she says in another print, "You can get twisted and tangled in your emotions."
Enjoy the tangle. Prints alone may sound like a small matter. Yet the show has plenty to keep one guessing, including two dozen sculptures. Bourgeois gave her etchings the look of freehand drawing—and then supplemented their slim curves and splotches with brush and pencil. The sculptures, in turn, run to studies for other work. An exception, a chair barely visible through encircling doors as one of her many Cells, is suitably comforting or confining.
The curators, Deborah Wye with Sewon Kang, seek a compromise between chronology and an arrangement by subject matter. It is not easy, given an artist who could not get enough repetition and variation. Room titles, such as "abstracted emotions" and "forces of nature," can be more cryptic than the prints, but then her thoughts and feelings always flow together. Those spider legs may spiral inward as a tightening of the chest or outward as a release. A bell jar can suggest natural history, but she may herself be the subject of an unwanted experiment. The Sky's the Limit, runs another title, but it is a difficult climb (or Montée Difficile).
The prints date mostly to the 1940s, before she turned once and for all to sculpture, and to her last twenty years. They look back to her childhood in France and ahead to life in New York, not far from today's Chelsea galleries. Their obsessive repetition also connects to both Surrealism and Post-Minimalism. A small figure bulges every which way like a prehistoric fertility goddess or the female body for Kiki Smith. Segmented sculpture can rear up like a horse for Raymond Duchamp-Villon—or weigh down like dreams for Eva Hesse. Prints on parallel staff lines may evoke forgotten melodies or formalism.
Artist books also allow her to tell stories, in both French and English. Her words have the simplicity of fairy tales and the complexity of a family history. She is always waiting for the man who got away—or the man who finally had the nerve to slam the door on her mother. The show concludes in the museum's atrium with larger prints and a large spider, its legs tightly encircling a steel cage. Does Bourgeois partly cover the cage with tapestry? She is still finding her way home.
Louise Bourgeois ran at the Jewish Museum through September 12, 2021, and her prints at The Museum of Modern Art through January 28, 2018. Related reviews look at Bourgeois in retrospective and Bourgeois as a painter.