Louise Bourgeois Show Notes
· Born: December 25, 1911, Paris, France
· Died: May 31, 2010, Manhattan, New York City, NY
· Follow up after our podcast with Nestor Zarragoitia, who talked about a secret door in a stair case piece by an artist named Louise Bourgeois - who is a very famous artist and an icon of feminist success in the arts
o Most people know her giant spider statues, which are usually public works, but tower above the viewer and the leg count isn’t always accurate. These giant spiders are one of the pieces of modern art Vanessa gets asked about regularly.
o Has a lot in common with Louise Nevelson, in that she was born early in the 19th century, was an immigrant to the USA, and didn’t gain fame until later in her life.
this artist deals with sex and female sexuality, the squeamish and super young may wish to avert their ears. Sorry. WE promise all artists aren’t perverts, it’s just the vast majority.
o Born in Paris to a middle class family (Irony that last name is Bourgeois-means middle class roughly-what middle class is, because Vanessa isn’t sure it exists anymore.) who restored medieval and renaissance tapestries and made a good living at it.
· Like Pablo Picasso learning to paint and draw from his artist father, Bourgeois learns to draw and think about art spatially from helping her parents reconstruct these tapestries. She said she mostly drew arms and legs, and that this visual understanding of dismemberment came to influence her later art.
· Louise’s (I would keep calling her Bourgeois, but this is a clumsy word for the American mouth, just like we murder the heck out of Louise.) father was a huge influence on her work. She didn’t talk about this influence much later in life, and denied his role at first.
o Women with Daddy issues is kinda an art school cliché. So is women making art about their daddy issues. It can be done well, but isn’t always.
o Her father wanted a son, and named her Louise after his Louis because of his disappointment at having a daughter. Though he later had a son, Louise actually became his favorite child.
· He didn’t always get along with her father and had a violent temper, which shades some of the art work. He also either hired his mistress as Louise’s tutor, or started sleeping with Louise’s tutor...I’m not real sure on this… but either way his mistress was living with the family and he had no qualms about the fact he was done sleeping with Louise’s mother. This fragrant disregard for social norms upset Louise a great deal and alienated her at a young age from their father. It also began her mental exploration of the roles men and women serve as sexual beings and how other’s sex can affect our idea of intercourse.
· she also cites a fantasy that children have of dismembering their parents, particularly the one of the opposite sex. (Do people? Really? Idk. I didn’t as a kid.) This does play into Jung’s idea that to mature as an adult you have to (Symbolically) kill your parents.
o her father and her do eventually develop a healthy relationship where they see each other more as equals and he ends up living with her in America. This in Vanessa’s mind shows how the role your parents play matures as you do. There is this point in your life where you see a living parent as a human being and gain enough life experience to sympathize with their foibles and mistakes, even if you struggle with acceptance. This may be some of the playing Louise does in her artworks, as it is easier to look back on these times with criticism and understanding.
o Another thing to think of is the role of the father, especially to someone born in 1910, as the first person to define a woman’s sexuality and demonstrate the power of the patriarchy on that sexuality. THis is another time, where the man was seen as the head of the family and his indiscretions normally ignored, whereas female sexuality was a closeted thing that was even widely believed to be non-existent (See the Stuff You Missed In History Class on Boston Marriages). So as the first male who exists in your life, the father at this time takes a rigid role in how the female defines herself and if she is allowed to exist in the public as a person with her own autonomy.
For example, he denounces and refuses to pay for her education at the Sorbonne because he hates “modern art” in an attempt to force her into a more acceptable female role. While parents still do this, the issue would have probably been less pronounced if she were male (She did continue at the Sorbonne, working as a translator for English speaking students in exchange for paid tuition), and he did help fund her opening a print business next to his after she graduated.
· In 1938, while working in a print shop, an art historian named Robert Goldwater walked in, and according to Louise "In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married."
· Louise sales with Goldwater to the USA shortly after her marriage and towards the end of her life felt she needed to be defined as an American artist, because she lives the majority of her life as an American and her work matures and is influenced by the free American spirit.
· Like Nevelson, Louise doesn’t thrive during the 40’s or 50’s. Her work has far more to do with Surrealism than the super manly Ab Ex movement that goes on in NYC under Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenburg’s curatorial gaze. She shows during this time, but is not taken as seriously as this infamous “boys club”, and even her obit has to include a paragraph of unnecessary gushing about how prominent these famous dudes were...which annoyed Vanessa, if only because they obscured more than they helped and that only needs to be pointed out so much.
· Louise’s husband does pass in the 1970’s while in his 60’s, and was a prominent art historian, but she remained both wistful and critical of him. THey had a good marriage, but she found his academics dull.
· In the 1940’s and 1950’s she adopts one child and gives birth to two. This results in a sculpture series in Balsa wood, which could be constructed without waking up sleeping children. This also stops her career for a decade, and is a common theme with many female artists...especially from this time...the financial, social issues, and time needed to raise children is so demanding it is hard to get a show, let alone have free time to spend as you like… so the story of a lot of women artists picks up after they either abandon their children, or reach a stable point in their lives where they no longer have to put a family before their own sanity or well being. Vanessa says this with a good deal of criticism, because even today a lot of men are allowed their “Dreams” while women struggle in the background, forced into a role of nurturing even if they don’t want it. Vanessa cant’ think of an instance where a male creative “Stopped making art to raise a family.” Please send her exceptions.
· 1950, property of the Moma.
From Bourgeois’ Obit: Then, in 1966, the critic Lucy Lippard, who, like so many New Yorkers, had known her effectively as Goldwater's appendage, saw her work, was astonished by it, and included it in a show she was organizing called Eccentric Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery.
· Destruction of the Father, 1974
· NO EXIT 1991 (Covered in NEZ Podcast)
"She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver... spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother." - about her spiders, called Maman, French for Mother...so they were about mothers and the process of making art
