Louise Bourgeois - The Wicked Little Girl

"I want revenge for being born, I want apologies, I want blood, I want
to do to others what has been done to me. To be born is to be ejected,
to be abandoned - therein lies the fury."
Louise Bourgeois

www.thepanicartist.com

This week on BBC 1 - I saw a very telling documentary on Louise
Bourgeois - who at the age of 96 - is generally considered to be the
greatest living female artist in the world. In her long career (as
long as Picasso's) Bourgeois has made: Cubist and Surreal oil
paintings, Tribal-like wooden towers, marble phallic shaped
abstractions, rubber phallus's and breasts, architectural spaces filed
with menacing domestic props and symbolic sculptures, embroidered
rants, tapestry masks (which cross 18th century French Tapestry design
with African masks), giant steel female spiders (their belly's full of
eggs), and countless heartfelt, uncanny and symbolic watercolours,
drawings and prints. Bourgeois is now the subject of a major
retrospective in Tate Modern in London - it is an exhibition I ache to
see - but simply cannot get to.

However having seen two exhibitions dedicated to her - the first in
The Douglas Hyde Gallery and the second in I.M.M.A. - I totally agree
that she is the greatest female artist alive today. But when seen in a
wider historical perspective - how good is she really?

There is no doubt that Bourgeois has been one of the most influential
artists of the last forty years - especially on female artists. A
quick look at the work made by young sculptors from the 1970's onward
- reveals just how much of a debt they owe her. Just look for example
at Kiki Smith in America, Dorothy Cross in Ireland or Tracey Emin in
England - not to mention male artists like Damien Hirst. In fact
Bourgeois is the Matriarch of identity art and its most complex and
intelligent exponent of it. But Bourgeois did not enjoy this theft of
her art - she believed people were robbing her images and ideas - she
was right - but it was a bit rich coming from someone who had done the
same for most of her life! Her art has an original flavour to it - but
like all great art it has been built upon the lessons of art history.

Personally I think she is up there with the very best hundred and
fifty known artists in Western art. There are only a few dozen men or
women in the west - who sacrificed so much psychic energy to their
art, fought such prejudices and customs and battled so very long for
recognition (she was almost seventy-one before her first major
retrospective in MOMA in 1982). However I think her work has not
reached beyond the third rank of importance - her concerns are too
private, to parochial and too baffling to ever have the universal
appeal of the likes of Raphael, Monet or Warhol. Moreover she is far
from the premier groundbreaking achievements of Giotto, Michelangelo,
Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya or Picasso.

As a female artist - I think she is the greatest of all time. I
identify with her misandry - as a counter weight to my own misogyny. I
doubt she would like me and I fear I would crumble in her terrifying
presence - but I would still be tempted to talk with her. I
completely identify with her passive-aggressive anger and hostility -
and I feel a kinship with her unbreakable creativity. I don't know
what its like to be a little girl afraid of her father and wanting to
be a man. But I do know what it is like to be a little boy afraid of
my mother and wanting to be a little girl! I instinctively understand
her fragmented icons, her torn words, her wounded ego, her tortured
and Janus faced sexuality, and her inner battle of self.

Bourgeois at her very best - is often revoltingly ugly - lodging panic
into men and turning the stomach of many women. The nasty edge to her
work puts off traditional art lovers who much prefer the pure beauty
and genteel femininity of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe and Helen
Frankenthaler or the ironic detachment of Cindy Sherman. Even Frida
Kahlo's paintings are more inviting to the viewer - for she often
makes pain look stylish and brave.

Of course notions of the Western Canon like this are both ignorant of
other cultures and the anonymous work of thousands of craftsmen and
women throughout time - who have fashioned masterpieces without the
conceit that artists after Giotto in the West have been plagued by.
Just one quick example of a hardly known great non-western female
artist would be Lei (sister of the devout Emperor Shun in China) -
reputed to be the mother of Chinese painting - a fact much lamented by
the men who came after her to take over this art form.

Typically in the West the mediums and subjects of female art -
embroidery, tapestries, flower arranging, still-life's or maternity
scenes have been denigrated as inferior art forms - while their
attempts to become painters and sculptors have been handicapped by
hostility masked as morality. Many female artists were restricted to
the role of happy amateur painting at home. Others who tried to make a
career for themselves were blocked from the life-class, often expected
to stop making art once married and certainly after having children -
and their subjects restricted to the domestic scene. Which is not to
say that there have not been highly successful female artists in the
Western tradition - just look at Angelica Kauffmann or Elisabeth Vigee-
Lebrun in the seventeenth century. However even in the 1940's an
artist like Lee Krasner willingly put her own career on hold - to
promote the work of her husband Jackson Pollock. Thus the handicraft
of women in particular has been written out of history - and this
unspoken injunction against female artists - is what Bourgeois
attacked head on in her work. Like a demented child tearing apart a
toy soldier - she sought to deconstruct the masculine edifice and
replace it with a feminine presence. One of her key strategies being
the use of needlepoint, stitching and embroidery to deliver witty and
sarcastic observations on the human body.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her father had wanted a
boy. Bourgeois maybe wanted to be a boy herself - she certainly grew
up resentful of male authority and the restricted ambitions and
potential for little girls. She struck me in interviews as a kind of
insane Katharine Hepburn type character - fiery, tempestuous,
rebellious and wickedly funny - but with a very soft, tender and hurt
hidden side.

According to Bourgeois - her father was a tyrant, quick to physically
discipline, given to prolonged monologues and rants at the dinner
table and worst of all betraying Louise's mother by carrying on with
the child's live-in Governess. Worse still her mother accepted this
unofficial menage-a-trois - leaving Louise betrayed three times over.

Some cynics like Brian Sewell have asked whether her childhood
warrants such an exhaustive, lengthy and repetitious exploration. So
what if her father was a patriarchal philanderer - he provided her
with a relatively stable home, Coco Channel dresses, trips to Cannes
and paid for her expensive and privileged education. Personally I
think it crass to question Bourgeois source of pain - maybe she has
exaggerated it in her art, but that is one of the main functions of
the artist - to magnify the everyday.

However perhaps the worst thing that Louise's father did - was to be
so very like herself. Since the 1970's Bourgeois has held a Salon - in
her run down home (its rooms crammed with her work and its walls
covered in her rants and cries of pain) in New York - with the art
critic Robert Storr. At such gatherings young artists came to show
them their work - and she pressed them for the meaning of it all. "But
why did you want to make that?" Seemed to be her most common question.
Seeing her at her Salon I could not help wonder at the purpose and
value of such sessions for those artists foolish enough to bring
themselves to her. Perhaps if you were also an artist interested in
auto-biographical art - they might have had some value - but to a
formalist they would have be utterly useless. Fundamentally I believe
that for little Louise - who had been forced to sit and listen
powerlessly to her father and other men rant on - it was a chance to
take to the head of the table in later life.

Her family was prosperous and her childhood was at least materially
privileged. She grew up in a large elegant Paris house - which she was
to later recreate in highly detailed scaled models - the most telling
one (Cell (Choisy),1990-1993) a large marble version in a cage with a
guillotine perched over it - ready to slice it in half. Houses for
Bourgeois - became cages for repression, betrayal, frustration, fear,
longing and pain. Her mother and father mended tapestry's - so from
any age Bourgeois worked with them learning the ancient skills of the
loom. Some of the tapestries that they mended - contained nude nymphs
and Goddesses - their owners felt embarrassed by the nudity in such
works and requested that the genitals be covered up. So one of little
Louise's first jobs was to help her parents sow little bunches of
grapes or fig leafs over the genitals! This crass desecration of art
by ignorant philistines - probably lead to her rebellious construction
of phallic and vulva sculptures in the late 1960's.

At the age of fifteen she studied mathematics in the Sorbonne in
Paris, and her grounding in geometry informed her early Cubist
paintings. In her late twenties Bourgeois trained in the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris and then worked in the studios of Bissiere and the
great Cubist painter Fernand Leger. It was Leger who convinced her
that her real talent lay in sculpture. He was right - she never had
any real painterly gift - her paintings tend to be naive, graphic, and
linear - more interesting for their potential realization in the third
dimension than for their brushwork, colour or painterly texture.

In the 1920's she hung around the Surrealists- but her hackles rose
when they treated her as just another bit of skirt - according to her
they were misogynistic men and the only women they cared for were
either sluts or rich society women who would buy their art. When she
said that Marcel Duchamp was like her father - it was not a
compliment.

A year before the outbreak of World War Two - Bourgeois escaped to New
York - with her new husband Robert Goldwater a reputable art historian
and specialist on African art. She said he was more like her mother
than her father - a real compliment in her book. Bourgeois intently
fell in love with the American metropolis - she admired its scale, its
ambition, its tolerance, its multi-culturalism and its greater freedom
for women. I am also sure she chuckled at the gross phallic posturing
of Manhattan's sky-scrappers.

No doubt Goldwater and Bourgeois spent many a long hour talking about
primitive art and its importance in Modern art. The out-standing
biographer John Richardson in 'Picasso a Life' volume two described
perfectly the Spaniards search for 'the-sacred-fire'. Picasso found it
in African art - which although technically brutal, simplistic and
crude - exploded with psychic energy, feeling and Voodoo. I think
Bourgeois found the same thing in Tribal art - but it took her decades
to move beyond mere imitation of its form into a true expression of
its feeling.

In 1949 she gave up painting and became a full time sculptor - she was
thirty-eight. The fact is that Bourgeois was a late developer - her
first sculptures in New York - her so called 'Skyscraper' works are
far too indebted to Brancusi, Picasso and Tribal art. She was still
using other men's grammar and other men's forms. Despite the fact that
MOMA bought one of her sculptures from her 1947 show - her work was
ignored by the New York art market of the 1950's and 1960's. In an art
market dominated by macho Abstract-Expressionism, cynical Pop art,
over theorized Post-Painterly Abstraction, and pious Hard-Edged
Abstraction - Bourgeois' work looked retarded, ugly and the work of a
crazy outsider.

Bourgeois created her first undoubted masterpiece Fillette (Little
Girl) in 1968 while still largely ignored. Made of battered latex - it
looks like a mangled and abused horse-sized dildo complete with balls.
It is a truly ugly and compelling work - a misandristic assault on the
male genitalia - made by a woman sick of sitting in silence, while men
postured around her. However after a third or fourth look - one finds
in it and other phallic images by her - a suppressed and surprising
tenderness and tongue in cheek black humour. It is telling that she
carried it under her arm like an umbrella at her triumphant MOMA show
in 1982!

In my experience women are fascinated by penises and their responses
range from; fear, disgust, contempt, hysteria, hilarity, affection,
love - and uncontrollable lust. Bourgeois manages to punctuate her
phallic objects with all these emotions - sometimes within a single
piece. She also links aspects of the phallus with elements of the
female body - by turns making it look like a breast, a torso, an udder
or some strange growth.

It was only in the early 1970's that her work began to gain wider
influence amongst a new generation of artists and feminist concerned
with issues Bourgeois had been exploring for decades - identity, the
body, gender and patriarchal structures. Now I have repeatedly
attacked the rise of Feminist historians and their hyping of
mediocrities like Gwen John and Tamara de Lempicka - but we can at
least be thankful that they discovered and promoted Bourgeois - though
she herself remained a loner belonging to no school.

Her breakthrough into greatness coincided with the death of her father
and her beloved Robert - which plunged her into a "fantastic
depression" - her words and I think they are telling. She doubted that
she had earned her new-found respect - and could not sleep at night.
Joseph Beuys another truly great Shaman of the twentieth century had a
similar breakthrough after a prolonged 'fantastic' depression. These
were not depressions of collapse - they were depressions of
liberation. It is strange to note that the Portuguese's Paula Rego -
another great female artist (equally interested in the complexes of
the family) should have also produced some of her greatest works since
her husbands death.

Like a woman with absolutely nothing to gain or lose - Bourgeois began
to create her greatest masterpieces - redolent with isolation, sexual
anger and auto-biographical staging. Moreover as her work hit its
stride - her finances, assistants and curatorial support gave her the
freedom to create ever more complex, ambitious and vast constructions.
The fact is that success in art breeds success - each sale helps fund
more ambitious projects. I sense that Bourgeois had been waiting for
this moment all her life - and she threw herself into it joyfully -
like a patient who meets her Park Avenue therapist at a party and
unburdens herself for five hours without spending a penny.

In the mid 1980's Bourgeois began making her 'cells' - semi-
architectural spaces in which she installed ambiguous and menacing
objects some found - some crafted. In this she may have been
influenced by Edward Kienholz - but there was a Freudian and Symbolic
overtone to her work that made it her own. Bourgeois by now had little
interest in nature - apart from the meat of flesh and the animal fears
of the family. Her work became increasingly auto-biographical and
drawn from painful memories of her childhood in France. Her work re-
staged the most private and traumatic episodes of her life in such an
unpalatable way that viewers often flinched away.

In 1993 she represented American at the Venice Biennale and in 1999
she was the first artist to fill the vast Turbine hall in Tate Modern
- which she did with did with three vast observation towers which the
viewer mounted via curving stair at the top of which were seats winged
by large parabolic mirrors - adjacent to the towers and spanning the
Turbine Bridge was huge thirty-five feet high Spider sculpture
('Maman' now outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) -
looming over the viewer protectively or threateningly according to
your view point. Of course Bourgeois was only responsible for the
drawing and planning of such vast sculptural works - most of the brute
work was done by assistants and foundries - but unlike other artists
of this approach - Bourgeois manages to infuse such 'factory-made'
works with genuine magic.

I have seen her in interviews many times over the years and I don't
think I have ever seen a more intimidating or sour looking woman in
all my life. I am reminded of Kate Nash's song Foundations: "You said,
I must eat so many lemons, because I am so bitter. I said I'd rather
be with your friends mate, because they are much fitter!" In fact
Bourgeois bitterness and black humour is refreshing in an art world
full of namby-pamby, hippies - trying to commune with nature or the
earth goddess. Bourgeois like the brilliant Post-Feminist Camille
Paglia - holds no such Utopian notions of femininity - she is as
terrified by the chthonian nightmare as by the patriarchal day-dream.
Paglia tellingly described in (Sexual Persona, 1990 P.5-6) Western
Civilizations fear of the chthonian thus; "Sex cannot be understood
because nature cannot be understood... The Dionysian is no picnic. It is
the chthonian realities, which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of
subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the
dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and
bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to
retain our Apollonian integrity as persons."

Perhaps in October 2007 - Brian Sewell was right when he wrote in The
London Evening Standard; "Her work is enthusiastically exhibited only
because she is, or pretends to be, a woman who hates men. This is
political correctitude gone mad: the work of any male sculptor who did
with female genitals what she has done with the penis would never see
the light of day and, regarded as a psychopathic danger to society,
nor would he."

As a male artist of this kind of ilk - I can testify to the truth of
his statement, but if the art world can grant the likes of Picasso the
right to his misogyny - then it has to grant Bourgeois the right to
her misandry.

Personally I believe art is an arena in which artists can battle with
their demons - safe in the knowledge that the only detrimental effect
on society - is offending a few narrow minded prudes. Even if
Bourgeois does hate men (which I doubt) at least she has the courage
and honesty - to let everyone into the anti-chamber of her fears. I do
not believe that repression or lies can ever be a cure for mental
instability - so the artist has a duty to express the unexpressed. In
fact many women have feelings of hatred towards men and many men have
feelings of hatred towards women - but what is more damaging to
society than these fears and prejudices - is their unspoken and
unreflective promotion of acts of cruelty and injustice.

www.thepanicartist.com