Artist Louise Bourgeois honoured in retrospective at NYC museum

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Artist Louise Bourgeois honoured in retrospective at NYC museum
17 hours ago
NEW YORK — Imagine being a leader in your field for over 60years. Imagine rubbing shoulders and exchanging ideas with theartistic greats of the last half-century. Imagine succeeding onyour own terms.
It's a feat few have achieved. It's a feat even fewer woman haveachieved.
Artist Louise Bourgeois is a success story. Born in Paris in 1911,Bourgeois moved in Parisian surrealist circles, moved to New York,became a leader in modern art and, at 96, is among the pre-eminentfemale artists working today. To honour her long and prolificcareer, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is opening on Friday thefirst full Louise Bourgeois retrospective.
Bourgeois has been showing work regularly since the 1940s and isprobably best known for her massive spider sculptures. A pair greetvisitors upon entering the Guggenheim's rotunda. "Spider Couple"(2003) - with gangly legs that can either entrap or embrace - and apair of shiny aluminum spirals that resemble clouds or intestines,depending on your mood, hang low near the entrance. They are thefirst introductions to works that can be intense, difficult,uncomfortable, bad and quite beautiful.
Versions of this retrospective were first shown at the Tate Modernin London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In bringing the show tothe Guggenheim, the museum's chief curator, Nancy Spector, said acertain amount of "rethinking" was involved to accommodate the"eccentricities" of the building, which is designed around aspiralling wide ramp with the centre of the structure left open.
On each floor is an unobtrusive gallery entrance so the spiralseems nearly unbroken. It is a wide, light, bright,vertigo-inducing space, but moving from the ramp to gallery andback to ramp can make for a jumbled experience. With this exhibit,where the feel of a timeline is so important, all the pieces aredisplayed along the spiral walkway and in one gallery room.
The spiral starts with Bourgeois's earliest works in the 1940s andends at the top with her most recent from 2008. It is a continuouspath and a lovely way to both use the space and allow viewers tosee progression in an artist's work.
Unfortunately, there's not much progress to track. The mediumschange - the 1940s oil to 1960s wood sculpture to marble and metal,found objects, installation pieces, fabric - but the message staysconsistent, somewhat redundant and extremely blatant.
The 1940s oil paintings that start the spiral show a heavysurrealist influence and are among the least impressive of herworks. Continuing into the 1950s are her wood sculptures - stacksof painted wood arranged to resemble bodies or abstractarchitectural forms. The most recognized, 1951's "Femme Volage" isstructurally the most interesting, though all bring to mind bothGiacometti and Brancusi.
Among the other wood forms are her African-influenced smallersculptures, consisting mostly of oblong wood totems with pointedtops surrounding shorter, rounded pieces. "One and Others" (1955)exudes a frightening sense of claustrophobia, of the malesurrounding the female with little way to escape. So begins theintroduction to the themes that still pervade her work today - maleand female, sexuality, violence, entrapment, anger, architectureand creation.
Farther up the spiral is "Cumul I" (1968), a beautiful, classicallooking marble sculpture. From a distance, it resembles a rollinglandscape and up close it appears to be phallic structures invarious states of emergence from their cover. Staying with thattheme - a few steps away - is the famous latex sculpture "Fillette"(1968), an obvious phallus hanging from its tip. But it alsoresembles feminine forms - artist Robert Mapplethorpe oncephotographed Bourgeois holding Fillette under her arm, a sly smileon her face.
Another curve of the spiral brings us to "The Destruction of theFather" (1974). The title leaves little to the imagination and itis a moonscape depiction under red light of a dismembered malefigure on a table, surrounded on all sides by surging femalerounded structures. Seen from above at a distance - a great benefitof the spiral - "Destruction" resembles a still from a horror film.The meaning couldn't be more clear.
Continuing up is 1993's bronze "Arch of Hysteria," a beautifulheadless male form arched backward, fingers almost touching heels.The sculpture shines and sways, casting a shadow on the white wall;a charcoal sketch of the work hanging above.
Next are the cells, a series of wire, glass and wooden doorstructures that pretty much encapsulate her career's long themes.The structures, some of which are difficult to see into, focus onmemory and a sense of being caged by the past.
The later years bring a change in medium with fabrics, clothing andpencil etching. The works themselves convey the same violence andsexuality as her earlier efforts, but the medium makes them intoslightly softer representations. What is telling about these mostrecent works is not that they bring the art of Louise Bourgeois toa new level, but that they explain just how integral her life andthemes are to her work.
If at 96 Bourgeois is still working with the issues she firstexplored 60 years ago, these issues are, in fact, her work.