What I Bump into when I Step Back…    

I collided with Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture for the first time in late fall 1982 when MoMA organized a major retrospective exhibition of her work in New York, where I had been studying for a year. I was about to turn twenty-six, and Bourgeois seventy-one. At the time I didn’t understand that I had just encountered the alpha female of my pack of women artists. It was a confusing moment in my life: I was caught between two passions, sculpture and contemporary dance, which had been a major reason for my coming to New York. I was caught as well between my rootedness in French verbal and political culture and my almost visceral relationship to New York, where I felt I was growing wings as a young woman artist, while the Parisian milieu had weighed like a leaden coat.

Thinking today about my reactions during that initial confrontation with Bourgeois’s work, I mostly remember the two large installations in latex, a material that I had discovered thanks to Eva Hesse, then one of the artists I looked up to. But Bourgeois used latex with a brutality, meanness almost, that took my breath away. The Destruction of the Father (1974) was set in a cavernous space cut into the museum’s white rooms. It swallowed me up. In a reddish twilight, roundish shapes hung close together from the ceiling, others rose from the floor, encircling a long low table, or maybe a bed, its surface crowded with small unnamable shapes. There was certainly no room of one’s own to be found within this carnal grotto saturated with yellowish latex things. Was I being devoured or was I one of the devourers? Without the work’s title, would I have allowed myself to recognize the strength and rage of my feelings towards my own father?

The other installation, Confrontation (1978), occupied a large room. Bourgeois created an elliptical space by setting many different roughly made, high-backed, white-painted wooden forms, edge-to-edge. The box-like constructions faced inward. In the center a very long stretcher, a table fit for a banquet, held a medley of latex forms, fragments of unnamable organs, “things” forever partial. I was no longer in New York, but in an ancient arena, in the shadow of Medea under a white sun. I was a guest offered the remains of a cannibalistic feast. I was looking at the execution and was the one dismembered. It took me a while to understand that Bourgeois was opening the door to my own inner theater. I felt intimidated by her versatility as a sculptor, her way of being both with and against Rodin, of summoning the body without representing it, her ability to project a female being, of embodying feminism in object–things and in acts. I recognized myself in her anger and in her complaint, in her aggressiveness and in her girlish voice.

Bourgeois caught me in a temporal shortcut. She was already an old lady, who would later become a very old lady, and she was my artistic contemporary. Up to this day, some of her sculptural and graphic works inhabit a permanent “present” for me.

Back in 1982, I adopted Bourgeois as a new ancestor. She took the place of my great aunt from Ardèche, with her wrinkled face and (very) hairy chin, who once joyfully told me, when my father announced that I was going to enroll in the Université d’Arts Plastiques (I never did register): “You’re right kiddo, with plastics you’ll have a future!” The shock produced by my initial encounter with Bourgeois’s sculpture played a role in the decisions I made over the following year. I abruptly turned my back on dance and decided to settle permanently, or so I thought at the time, in New York. Since then, Bourgeois has been a traveling companion, lending me her hands to hold the pickaxe and dig deep. Some of her sculptures stand as my personal totems, lucky charms.

Sleeping Figure, carved in wood in 1950, is verticality itself, despite its title. It stands in utmost alertness, the body as if petrified by sleep. I grew up with the small and larger statues that my father brought back from each of his work stays in West Africa. A geographer by training, he began a doctoral thesis on a region of Nigeria in 1966, but abandoned it, and university teaching, to work for local governments and NGOs as a consultant on pastoralism and in the fight against desertification. These objects and sculptures from another continent had come to stand as symbolic substitutes for my father, oft absent from our everyday life. It was easy for me to associate them with Bourgeois’s slender, mute forms. Her upright wood figures made in the late 1940’s and early ’50s count among my lucky charms in their almost shy presence.

As for totems, here comes Fillette, modeled in 1968 and guest starring in Robert Mapplethorpe’s unforgettable 1982 photograph reproduced on the frontispiece of the MoMA catalog1. Seventy- year-old Louise, with her bright eyes and triumphant smile, sets forth with a maxi penis in plaster and latex under her right arm.  What chutzpah! To leave with the phallus, as one goes out with one’s purse, or with a baby that one may have picked up for a cuddle… To slip away with this trophy, after having won it fair and square!

And then there is the decapitated, half-canine, half-feline beast, in the stiff posture of a sphinx straightening to attention, its torso with protruding ribs and several pairs of swollen breasts, its tense muscles and vertical penis. This hybrid figure appears twice in somewhat differing configurations. Bourgeois cast the first one, Nature Study (1984), in different materials: polished bronze, red wax, blue and pink rubber, and, later, porcelain. The second one, The She-Fox (1985) is a unique piece carved in black marble. Bourgeois claimed the first as a self-portrait, the second as a portrait of her mother. For me, these two powerful she-animals trigger a conflagration around the image of the feminine with their vigilant, authoritative postures, the violence of their missing heads, cut clean, their bodies ready to pounce, their mixing of phallic power and restrained fertility.

Finally, in 1999, when I thought I could no longer be surprised by this woman nearing ninety, here comes Maman, the nine-meter-tall, monumental matriarch of the series of spiders begun in 1994, a sculpture brutal and terrifying, yet almost tender, almost dancing. High above, at the heart of the long, braided legs, a small body, fruit pit or bomb carries white marble eggs in a wire cage. The image is too much. I get a real kick out of the sculpture. It becomes a forest or a cathedral, and closes the loop opened by The Blind Leading the Blind, whose first version, dated 1947, assembled of wood painted red and black, danced on its seven pairs of elongated triangular legs. There is a lifetime of sculpture between the spectacular steel creature and the ambiguous assemblage of roughly handled sawn timber, which exemplifies a fragile anthropomorphism, a perfectly apt expression fashioned by Robert Storr2.

Today, I haven’t yet reached the age Bourgeois was when I first encountered her work. Though she has been dead twelve years, she has become, in a strange way, more present to me as a “person” than she was when alive. My only interaction with Louise Bourgeois herself took place during a telephone conversation in the late 1980s. I had called to ask if she would agree to receive me and a small group of my sculpture students from the Rhode Island School of Design in her studio. From the first minute, Louise switched non-stop from French to English: when I spoke in English, she answered me in French, and vice versa. She fired questions at me. Did I take her studio for a zoo? What was my work about? Did I imagine that you could be a teacher and an artist at the same time? Which other artists had I called? Did I think they were “real” sculptors? On and on. In this conversation, which I was unable to cut short, I felt like a hooked, wriggling fish. Once off the phone, wrung out, humiliated and angry, I took measure of the relationship I wanted to have, or could have with Bourgeois. I never tried again to rub shoulders with “La Louise”, something I sometimes regret. Instead, I chose a not-always smooth companionship with her work over what she may have offered me, or taken from me, in a personal relationship. Her indomitableness terrified and awed me.

Writing this text, I see how it relies on the chronology of her works and our bodies. If my encounter with Bourgeois’s work was essential for the young aspiring sculptor I was in 1982, her ability to live her work, to dig ever deeper, to take chances again and again over seven decades, is no less crucial to the aging woman I am today. Bourgeois’s work has nourished me for a long time. Today it is Louise herself who gives me pluck.

1 Reproduced in the frontispiece of the exhibition catalog, but the photograph was cropped so as to not show the phallus.
2 Robert Storr,  Louise Bourgeois, Géométries intimes, Paris, Hazan, 2016, p.142.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, Transatlantique, ER Publishing, 2022