The Work of Louise Bourgeois
The artist’s legacy at the National Gallery
The recent Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington was titled “No Exit,” as in the play by Jean-Paul Sartre, because Bourgeois liked to think of herself as a rational existentialist like Sartre, and not as a dreamy surrealist, the movement with which she’s most often identified. That tension between reason and emotion, a male-dominated world and feminine ecstasy, informs her work and is perfectly embodied in the drawing M Is for Mother (1998), seen here, that was a highlight of the exhibit. But the late Bourgeois, who was born in Paris but came to live in America in 1938 when she married an American, was always an individualist, eschewing labels or nationalities.
She told an interviewer this wonderful anecdote to explain her feelings about how art is regarded in her native land and adopted home: “When I was a little girl, growing up in France,” Bourgeois said, “my mother worked sewing tapestries. Some of the tapestries were exported to America. The only problem was that many of the images on the tapestries were of naked people. My mother’s job was to cut out the—what do you call it? Yes, the genitals of the men and women, and replace these parts with pictures of flowers so they could be sold to the Americans. My mother saved all the pictures of the genitals over the years, and one day she sewed them together as a quilt and gave the quilt to me. That’s the difference between French and American aesthetics.”
The work at the National Gallery show was both from Bourgeois’s early career and later on (she died in 2010 at the age of 98) and is part of the museum’s collection. Check out some provocative examples:
