Louise Bourgeois: A journey to motherhood, old age – and back

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Moderna Museet, Stockholm has a current show of work by the late Louise Bourgeois. Beth Williamson takes a look at the catalogue.

Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back, edited by Iris Müller-Westermann, texts by Daniel Birnbaum et al.

The long and prolific career of artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is well known, so what can another exhibition catalogue add to our understanding and appreciation of her work? Richly illustrated with images of the artist’s work, as well as archival documents and photographs, this catalogue of the current Stockholm show, much like Bourgeois’s work itself, seems to draw a line from childhood to motherhood to old age and back again.

This is not, however, a straightforward chronological narrative. Rather, the catalogue, in line with exhibition, is organized around nine themes with which Bourgeois engaged time and again in her life: Runaway Girl, Loneliness, Trauma, Fragility, Nature Studies, Eternal Movement, Relationship, Talking and Giving, and Balance.

The works in the ‘Runaway Girl’ theme deal with the artist’s move away from her family in France, forging a new life and new identities. The idea of home features heavily and the ‘Femme Maison’ (or ‘woman house’) series of works merge architecture and the human body in a way that seems to compromise both, and home becomes a limiting factor for Bourgeouis.

The ‘Loneliness’ section of works features her ‘Personages’. Singular or sometimes in twos, these pared-down standing figures are pervaded with a sense of loneliness. Made first in the 1940s, these are forms that Bourgeois returned to later in her career with a final group of six sculptures titled Echo in 2007. A third theme ‘Trauma’ is a more obvious one for Bourgeouis’s work. In her own words ‘The motivation is emotional and murderous or whatever you call it, but the form has to be absolutely pure’.

‘Fragility’ is the fourth theme and unsurprisingly concerns itself with the balance between physical and psychological presence. As human beings we are, as Bourgeois recognizes, always working to balance ourselves, whatever our age. All the works in this section were made between 1986 and 2004, when Bourgeois was between 75 and 93 years old and so indicating the life-long struggle to deal with one’s own fragility or vulnerability. Bourgeois said that ‘our own body is a figuration that appears in mother earth’.  Including works such as Mamelles (1991) and Topiary (2005) this ‘Nature Studies’ group of works deals, essentially, with the body as landscape.

‘Eternal Movement’ presents works that address the essence of being alive, the infinite thread, or red skein as Bourgeois calls it, connecting life and death in fundamental terms. ‘Relationship’ and ‘Talking and Giving’ are both themes that deal with relationships. The outstretched hands of 10am Is When You Come to Me (2006) are especially poignant. Finally, ‘Balance’ contains a group of works that deal with our attempts to achieve some sort of harmony or balance in our lives. Dealing with extremes of emotions and experiences and surviving those extremes, this section includes the untitled work from 1996 that features on the catalogue’s back cover and is perhaps a lesson in survival for the reader: ‘I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful’.

A key contribution of this catalogue to our understanding of Bourgeois’s work is precisely that it unhinges these important themes from any strict chronology or ideas of cause and effect in her life and work. Five years after her death, her work continues to confront us with uncomfortable truths about her life and our own. It may be, as one local critic wrote, that the exhibition suggested ‘a delightful levity and beauty that places the artist in a more positive and progressive light’ than that in which she is normally viewed. But when I visited Moderna Museet on a cold April weekend, the giant spider Maman (1999) stood outside the museum entrance as if guarding the exhibits within – a sentry beneath a dark, brooding sky – and Bourgeois’s work seemed as troubling to me as it ever did.

Written to accompany the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (14 February to 17 May 2015), the catalogue has texts by several authors and an interview with Bourgeois. The texts are relatively short, although the interview runs to around ten pages and so gives more weight to the artist’s own voice than those of curators or historians.

Louise Bourgeois. I Have Been to Hell and Back edited by Iris Müller-Westermann,  foreword by Daniel Birnbaum, Ann-Sofi Norig, texts by Iris Müller-Westermann, Léa Vuong, interview with the artist by Christiane Meyer-Toss, graphic design by Patric Leo, is published by Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Hatje Cantz Verlag (English language), 2015. 288pp., 278 illus, €39.80, $60.00, £35.00. ISBN 978-3-77757-3970-2