Motif Exploration

WORLD HISTORY OF ART, ARCHITECTURE & CULTURE Louise Bourgeois by Preethi Kosanam 2020



Artist Louise Bourgeois Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. She was best-known for her installation art and large-scale sculptures. She was also a painter and print maker. Bourgeois explored many themes over her career, including domesticity, family, sexuality and death.Bourgeois was born in Paris, France.

Louise Bourgeois's work, which spanned most of the 20th  century, was heavily influenced by traumatic psychological events from her childhood, particularly her father's infidelity. Bourgeois's often brooding and sexually explicit subject matter and her focus on three- dimensional form were rare for women artists at the time. Beginning in the 1970s, she hosted Sunday salons in her Chelsea apartment, where students and young artists would take their work to be critiqued by Bourgeois, who could be ruthless and referred to the gatherings, with characteristically dry humor, as \"Sunday, bloody Sunday\". Nevertheless, this accessibility and willingness to advise younger artists was exceptional for an established artist of such standing. Her influence on other artists since the 1970s looms large, but is manifested most strongly in feminist-inspired body art and in the development of installation art.

Accomplishments Bourgeois's artwork is renowned for its highly personal thematic content involving the unconscious, sexual desire, and the body. These themes draw on events in her childhood for which she considered making art a therapeutic or cathartic process. Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain. Through the use of abstract form and a wide variety of media, Bourgeois dealt with notions of universal balance, playfully juxtaposing materials conventionally considered male or female. She would, for example, use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of femininity.



Louise Bourgeois Artworks

Femme Maison (1946-47) This series dealt with the dramatic changes in Bourgeois's private life in the early 1940s: marriage and domesticity, living in a foreign country, and mothering three children. Each drawing or painting in the series depicts a nude female figure whose head has been replaced by architectural forms that resemble houses. Bourgeois struggled to live up to her idealized memory of her own mother. These works suggest that she felt both trapped and exposed by the domestic responsibilities that consumed her life as she wrestled with finding her artistic voice.

The Blind Leading the Blind (1947-49) The Blind Leading the Blind, constructed from pointed wooden planks attached to a flat beam, is an early sculpture in which Bourgeois used abstract forms to express personal feelings about her parents. The artist likens this piece to a table under which she spent time watching her parents' legs move across the room. Moreover, she recalls this memory as an unpleasant one, as she felt alienated from her parents and sought refuge under furniture.

Femme Volage (Fickle Woman) (1951) Femme Volage  is part of Bourgeois's  Personnages  series, made between 1945 and 1955. The series includes approximately 80 standing sculptures touching on the autobiographical themes that occupied Bourgeois throughout her career. Each piece resembled or recalled a person known to the artist. These abstract totemic figures were shown with no bases and were arranged in clusters that for Bourgeois referenced a reconstruction of the past. Femme Volage is a fractured piece made up of stacked wooden forms on a central rod that resembles a needle or spindle, tools that likely reference her mother's work as a weaver. This work also shows her early interest in the spiral form.

Forêt (Night Garden) (1953) This work evolved from Bourgeois's Personnages, but whereas the earlier works were rigid and singular,  Forêt  shows what Bourgeois referred to as a \"softening\" in her work stemming \"from the softness of my children and of my husband ... I got the nerve to look around me, to let go. Not to be so nervous. Not to be so tense.\" These less severe, often bulbous and increasingly biomorphic shapes would come to define her work and indicate the enduring influence Surrealism had upon her. In  Forêt, unlike in  Personnages, the wooden forms are placed together on a single base and suggest human figures or even plant forms huddled together. The artist leaves it to the viewer's imagination to decide if one is being excluded from this group, or if these are figures banding together for protection and intimacy.

Soft Landscape I (1967) In the 1960s, Bourgeois shifted from working with wood to other materials such as plaster, cement, aluminum, and latex. In 1967, she created The Landscape series, which consisted of amorphous shapes rather than the stiff, upright forms of the previous decade.  Soft Landscape I  was made by pouring caramel-colored resin over biomorphic forms that resemble a landscape. Indeed, Bourgeois described the bubbling and sprouting figures in this series as inspired both by the human body and by landscape, saying that the \"body could be considered from a topological point of view, a landscape with mounds and valleys and caves and holes, so it seems rather evident . . . that our body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.\" Other pieces in the series play with the disruption of the soft/hard binary. In the  End of Softness  (1967), for example, gentle biomorphic forms are made of bronze.

The Destruction of the Father (1974) This was Bourgeois's first installation piece at a time when installation art was in its infancy and was being used by feminists such as Judy Chicago. The work was also Bourgeois's first to explicitly reveal her anger over her father's infidelity, which was an underlying motivation for much of her work. Relying on the soft forms of her  Landscape  series and her often explicit body imagery, the work reenacts a childhood fantasy wherein she takes revenge on her father, who always gloated and bragged at the dinner table. A life-size dining table in a cave or womb-like space is covered with flesh-colored anthropomorphic forms that appear like dismembered body parts as well as actual joints of lamb, which underscore implied violence. The scene is bathed in a soft red light that symbolizes anger, death, and blood, inviting the viewer to witness the aftermath of the killing.

Maman (1999) The spider first appears in Bourgeois's work in the 1940s, and had explicit, positive associations for the artist, who saw the spider as a symbol of her mother. Bourgeois is explicit about this connection: \"The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.\" Bourgeois made spiders in a wide variety of media and ranging in size from a four-inch brooch to Maman, a sculpture over 30-foot-tall, which includes a sack containing 17 gray and white marble eggs, and is so large that it can only be installed outdoors. Though the earliest examples of spiders in Bourgeois's work are found in two drawings from 1947, she focused on the theme most consistently in the 1990s, at the end of her life, when she was no doubt consumed with memories of her mother and her childhood.

Spiral Woman (2003) Spiral Woman, a hanging doll, showcases Bourgeois's longstanding interest in both dollmaking and the spiral form, as seen in the much earlier Femme Volage (1951). Like Hans Bellmer's poupées, the figures in the Spiral Woman series offer distorted, Surrealist-inspired visions of the human body. The 2003 version pictured here is headless with feminine curves, but its spiral form connotes a masculine form, underscoring the overlap of male and female anatomy in her work. As with so much of Bourgeois's  oeuvre, the spiral had autobiographical significance for her, as she stated in the following: \"It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and wring them. . . Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by wringing her neck. The spiral - I love the spiral - represents control and freedom.\"

Inspiration MAMAN



Maman (1999) is a sculpture of bronze, stainless steel and marble  by the artist Louise Bourgeois. The sculpture depicting a spider  is among the largest in the world, more than 30 feet high and m ore than 33 feet wide (927 x 891 x 1024 cm). It contains a bag cont aining 32 marble eggs, and its abdomen and thorax are made of r ibbed bronze.

Philosophy and meaning The sculpture takes up the theme of the arachnide that Bourgeoi s had first conceived in a small ink and charcoal drawing in 1947,  continuing with his 1996 sculpture Spider. It alludes to the powe r of Bourgeois' mother, with the metaphors of spinning, weaving , nurturing and security.Her mother, Josephine, was a woman w ho repaired tapestries at her father's textile restoration worksho p  in  Paris.  When  Bourgeois  was  twenty- one, she lost her mother to an unknown illness. A few days after  her mother passed away, in front of her father (who did not see m to take his daughter's sorrow seriously), Louise threw herself i nto the River Bièvre; she swam to rescue her.

The Spider has become an ode to my mother. She was a best fri end of mine. Like a worm, my mom was a weaver. My family wa s in the tapestry repair business, and my mother was in charge  of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was smart. Spiders a re nice creatures who kill mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoe s transmit disease and are often unwanted. Yeah, spiders are h elpful and defensive,just like my mother.

Permanent locations Some of these editions in permanent collections often tour on exhibit: Tate Modern, UK – The permanent acquisition of this sculpture in 2008 is considered one of the Tate Modern's historical moments.  Maman  was first exhibited in the turbine hall and later displayed outside the gallery in 2000. It was received with mixed reactions of amazement and amusement. The sculpture owned by the Tate Modern is the only one made from stainless steel. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada – The National Gallery of Canada acquired the sculpture in 2005 for 3.2  million dollars. At that time, the price was deemed excessive by some critics, as it took around a third of the annual budget of the gallery. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan – On display at the base of Mori Tower, outside the museum. Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, South Korea Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA Qatar National Convention Center, Doha, Qatar







This motif was inspired by the artwork Maman. The spider legs, illustrated by the squiggly lines at the back, the marbles in the body of the spider sketched out as circles and traced out with the creative licence I own. The muted neutral pink set as the backdrop was inspired by another art work of Louise Bourgeois, titled the blind leading the blind.

Thankyou 2020