Louise Bourgeois

Drawings 1947 – 2007

25 March 2020

Online Exhibition

Born in 1911, Bourgeois began drawing at a young age – as a girl, her skills allowed her to assist at her parents’ tapestry restoration business, where she helped design and draw templates for fabrics in need of repair. Years later, drawing became a way of chronicling her inner thoughts and anxieties. Like her clothing, which Bourgeois considered a kind of diary marking significant events from her past, so too her drawings were a record, over time, of feelings and reactions to the world around her. Sometimes these were highly conscious exercises in controlling and quieting her anxiety, at other times they were more visceral meanderings and repetitions of mark and line. Her creative process has always been fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. For her, drawing was a way to pinpoint and alleviate psychic tension: ‘When I draw it means that something bothers me, but I don’t know what it is. So it is the treatment of anxiety’.

The works in this online presentation articulate different states of Bourgeois’s emotional terrain: love, happiness, fear, anger, and despair, as well as self-affirmation and redemption. Though her drawings constitute a very separate practice from her sculptural work, they retain a similar tension, oscillating between figuration and abstraction.

Unique personal symbolism and formal motifs recur throughout, along with references to architecture, anatomy, geometry, and the natural world. In an untitled work from 1970, an unfolding spiral takes up the entire picture frame. For Bourgeois, its implied movement was associated with both the fear of losing control and the freedom of giving it up. Another familiar motif is the disembodied pair of eyes, seen in a pencil and watercolour drawing from 1974, playing with notions of power and the gaze. The work ‘Spit or Star’ from 1986 depicts a pair of large blue scissors floating alongside a smaller red pair above a barren landscape. The imagery of the scissors references the Bourgeois family’s tapestry business, alluding to reparation and restoration. They also symbolize the mother and child. For Bourgeois, cutting was both a form of separation, as with the umbilical cord, and a form of healing, as when a limb is cut from a tree in order to maintain its strength.

Such motifs give these pieces a conceptual and multi-layered complexity which is seen throughout Bourgeois’s oeuvre. Her drawings are often linked to her psychoanalytic writings, where words and images would come together to describe various psychic states and experiences. For Bourgeois, the act of drawing on paper was a refuge from the intricacies of human experience: ‘The abstract drawings come from a deep need to achieve peace, rest and sleep’.

Selected images

Spit or Star

1986

Untitled

1974

About the Artist

Louise Bourgeois

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

Bourgeois’s work is inextricably entwined with her life and experiences: fathoming the depths of emotion and psychology across two- and three-dimensional planes of expression. ‘Art,’ as she once remarked in an interview, ‘is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma.’ Arising from distinct and highly individualized processes of conceptualization, Bourgeois's multiplicity of forms and materials enact a perpetual play: at once embedding and conjuring emotions, only to dispel and disperse their psychological grasp. Employing motifs, dramatic colors, dense skeins of thread, and vast variety of media, Bourgeois's distinctive symbolic code enmeshes the complexities of the human experience and individual introspection.

Rather than pursuing formalist concerns for their own sake, Bourgeois endeavored to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining a wide range of materials—variously, fabric, plaster, latex, marble and bronze—with an endless repertoire of found objects. Although her oeuvre traverses the realms of painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois remains best known for her work in sculpture.

Bourgeois’s early works include her distinct 'Personages' from the late 1940s and early 1950s; a series of free-standing sculptures which reference the human figure and various urban structures, including skyscrapers. The ‘Personages’ served as physical surrogates for the friends and family Bourgeois had left behind in France, while also highlighting an interest in architecture dating back to her childhood. Her installation of these sculptures as clustered ‘environments’ in 1949 and 1950 foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre’s rise to prominence.

Bourgeois’s work was included in the seminal exhibition ‘Eccentric Abstraction,’ curated by Lucy Lippard for New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Major breakthroughs on the international scene followed with The Museum of Modern Art in New York's 1982 retrospective of her work; Bourgeois's participation in Documenta IX in 1992; and her representation of the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 2001, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective of her works, which subsequently traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., cemented her legacy as a foremost grande dame of late Modernism.

Header image: Louise Bourgeois, ARCHED FIGURE, 1993 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Christopher Burke