Interviews, Issue 4

In Minds Of: Louise Bourgeois

The Easton Foundation and Ralph Rugoff unfold Louise Bourgeois’s legacy and approach to her creative process.

Words THE EASTON FOUNDATION, PLUS MAGAZINE

PART 1 (The Easton Foundation)

Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career—including installation, performance, drawing, painting, and printmaking—she is most known as a sculptor. She often stated that her creative process was a kind of exorcism: a way of reconstructing memories and emotions in order to free herself from their grasp. In this way, she explored the full range of human experience, consistently returning to the body as a primary form. In tandem with her artwork, Bourgeois also produced an expansive range of writings, which confirm the intensity and conflicting nature of her feelings.

Bourgeois kept a diary, in one form or another, for eighty-four years. The ebb and flow of her entries, which begin in 1923 and last through 2006, correspond to her needs of the moment and display great variation in frequency and intensity. In some years there is a flood of activity, while in others, the entries are regular but not revelatory. During a period of intense Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois stopped keeping diaries altogether and wrote on loose sheets of paper. Referred to as the “psychoanalytic writings,” these tend to be longer and more visceral than the diaries’ more day-to-day content, and comprise of dream-recordings, hypothetical conversations, and thoughts on her art-making process. Language is a central component of her artwork as well, appearing across all mediums.

Though Bourgeois’s relationship to writing evolved over time, the emotional concerns she explored are constant. Similarly, though the mediums and materials of her artwork changed throughout her career, her core focus remained. Both her art and writing were born from her need to express her inner psyche, to tap into her unconscious and thereby understand her feelings and reactions to the outside world. Though Bourgeois felt her art required no apology or defense—she wrote, “not a word out of me is needed”—her writings provide profound insight into her symbolic thinking and are an artform in and of themselves (January 8, 1992).

The following excerpts are arranged chronologically and have been edited for clarity and relevance. Bourgeois wrote in both French and English; text in italics indicates passages that have been translated. Several are from the “psychoanalytic writings,” produced in the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The selection shows the variety of materials and formats Bourgeois used, from the turquoise ink of her psychoanalytic period to the red ink on sky blue paper she favored later in life. These texts survey some of the artist’s lifelong preoccupations: reconciliation, death, sexuality, and memory, which she continually grappled with in her art. “Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” (“Self-Expression Is Sacred and Final: Statements” in Meyer-Thoss, Christiane. Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall. Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1992, p. 184.)

I do not have to live in an empty world

world of vacuum (Marie Bonaparte) I can create

my own, artist world of omnipotence + fantasy

I have to control space because I cannot

stand emptiness

emptiness is a space the edge of which you do

not know and you are not sure of – like falling

into space or like being dizzy.

this question of space is perhaps sim

ply to have had fear of falling –

When Pierre was born Maman said – Louise got up

and she walked. Maybe I was just

afraid to fall at that moment – Vertigo and

great fear on balconies (roof at 18^th St)

Pull yourself together. Do not try several things

just so that one will pull you away from the

one before – Be modest and tight knitted

Always upon the loom your work shall put back –

Perfect and revisit again

January 29, 1958. Loose sheet: 11 x 8 3/8 in. (27.9 x 21.3 cm).

PART 2 (The Woven Child)

PLUS: I want to discuss two separate but related periods of Louise Bourgeois’s life — her early life encountering tapestry and the artworks she has produced during the last decade of her career.

RALPH RUGOFF: Louise Bourgeois grew up in a family of tapestry restorers, and her mother supervised a workshop of people who would repair old tapestries. As a child, Bourgeois was brought in to help, and her job was to draw in missing elements of the tapestry. So, if a figure was missing a foot, she would draw it, which the weavers would then reproduce. It’s interesting because her later work is filled with free-floating limbs or bodies without parts.

P: So collecting these fabrics acted as her collective memories.

RR: It suggests some kind of recuperation, but also a remnant part of something leftover from an object that’s no longer a whole piece. For her, it was important that each item of clothing belonged to herself or to somebody she knew. She looked at these as pages of a diary about parts of her life, places she’d been, people she knew.

P: In 1938, she moved to New York, started a family of her own, and was exposed to different environments. Can you walk through how this influenced her practice?

RR: Interestingly enough, after she moved out of the family home and rented her own apartment, it was in the same building as the gallery run by the Surrealists. She also studied with Fernand Léger, and went on a trip to Moscow, in part because of her interest in Constructivist art. So, she already knew people in the art world. When she came to New York, there was an ex-patriot community of French artists she also got to know, including several Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp.

When she had her first show of sculpture in New York, she exhibited sculptures made of pieces of wood called the Personages. She said they reflected the people she left behind in Paris and also the vertical architecture of New York. This idea of extreme verticality inspired her in a number of ways and perhaps she also related this to the upright posture of human beings.

P: The Spider are considered the most well-known part of her oeuvre. This work, which was an ode to her mother, might seem grotesque at first glance but conveys an almost poignant vulnerability and enmeshes conjuring emotion.

RR: I believe Bourgeois picked up on the idea of a spider because it creates its home out of its own body. She noted that if one bumps into a spider’s web, the spider won’t abandon it but will instead set about fixing it. So she associated spiders with the act of repairing as well.

For Bourgeois, who generally looked at relationships in ways that underscored their ambivalent character and the uncertain nature of sexuality and maternity, the spider could represent a mother who was overpowering and dominant, as well as protective. Many of the Spider sculptures are a monstrous size for a real spider. But then their legs are so spindly and flimsy-looking that the sculpture looks entirely precarious. This balance between opposing values is characteristic of her work, which often creates ambiguity by setting up these tensions between two seemingly incompatible sides of something. It’s what makes her work psychologically rich – she never saw things in simple terms.