Louise Bourgeois and the Workshop of Memory

In 1923, an eleven year old girl in Antony, just south of Paris, began helping in her family’s workshop for restoring antique tapestries by drawing in the parts that damaged tapestries had lost. Louise Bourgeois spent the rest of a very long life doing a version of the same job: repairing, rebuilding and redrawing the parts of her own past that would not hold still.

A household of thread

Bourgeois was born in Paris on 25 December 1911, the middle child between an older sister, Henriette, and a younger brother, Pierre. According to the chronology published by the Museum of Modern Art, the family lived in Choisy-le-Roi from 1912 to 1919, where they ran a workshop restoring antique tapestries, and then moved to Antony while keeping a gallery in Paris. Her mother ran the workshop; the Paris gallery was her father’s.

That arrangement became the raw material of her art. Her mother died in 1932 after a long illness, during which Bourgeois had nursed and kept her company. The same year she began studying mathematics at the Sorbonne, then drifted through the studios of Paris and studied art history at the École du Louvre. In 1938 she made her first print, a holiday card titled St. Germain, opened a small space for prints and paintings inside her father’s gallery of antique tapestries, and met the American art historian Robert Goldwater. They married that year and left for New York.

New York and the upright figures

The first years in America were spent on paper as much as in three dimensions. In 1939 she enrolled at the Art Students League, where Vaclav Vytlacil taught her painting and Will Barnet taught her lithography. From 1946 she worked on and off at Atelier 17, the print workshop Stanley William Hayter had moved from Paris during the war. Her first solo exhibition, of paintings, opened at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1945.

In 1947 she published He Disappeared into Complete Silence, nine engravings paired with short parables. The images are towers and buildings more than people, and MoMA’s chronology reads them as a sign of where she was heading. The same year she made the drawing later known as Femme Maison, a woman whose head and upper body are replaced by a house. When she reissued it as a photogravure in 1984, the image had already been adopted as an emblem by the women’s art movement.

The move into sculpture came in 1949, when she showed tall, totem-like wooden figures at the Peridot Gallery. These are the early Personages that Glenstone Museum placed at the start of its survey of her work. They stand on the floor like guests at a party who have not yet decided whether to speak. MoMA holds Sleeping Figure from 1950; the Guggenheim holds Femme Volage from 1951, the year her father died.

Soft matter

In 1952 Bourgeois began an intensive psychoanalysis that lasted until 1966, with occasional sessions continuing until 1984. Whatever was said in those rooms, the work changed. In 1964 she showed organically shaped plaster sculptures at the Stable Gallery, a sharp break from the upright wooden figures. Two years later the critic Lucy R. Lippard included her in Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, beside the much younger Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. A marble from 1969, Cumul I, is now in the Centre Pompidou.

Goldwater died in 1973. The following year Bourgeois exhibited The Destruction of the Father, a room-sized installation, at 112 Green Street in New York. Glenstone, which acquired the work, describes it as a theatrically lit diorama of primal violence and as her first installation. The title leaves little doubt about whose destruction is meant, and the work also points forward. Glenstone calls it a precursor to the Cells, and the idea of an enclosed, lit room as a stage for memory would occupy her for the next three decades.

The Cells

Recognition arrived late and then all at once. In 1982 MoMA mounted her first retrospective, organised by Deborah Wye, with the first monographic catalogue. Bourgeois was seventy. In 1986 she built Articulated Lair, a room-sized sculpture that the MoMA chronology identifies as a forerunner of what came next.

What came next was shown in 1991 at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh: six enclosed structures called Cells. A year later, at Documenta IX, she showed Precious Liquids, a monumental Cell incorporating clothing. In 1993 she represented the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale. Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), made between 1989 and 1993 from marble, mirrors, steel and glass, is at Tate Modern. Tate’s wider holdings run from Knife Couple of 1949 to I Am Afraid of 2009, according to its collection pages.

From 1996 she began building sculptures out of old garments, and the textile history of her childhood returned in plain sight. In 2001 she made her first unique fabric book, The Trauma of Abandonment, using photographs of her father from the First World War.

The spider

Bourgeois had been sketching spiders since 1947, according to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The motif reached its largest form in 1999 with Maman, a spider of steel and marble more than nine metres high, made for the first commission in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall when the museum opened in 2000. It shared the hall with I Do, I Undo, I Redo, three monumental towers. Beneath the spider’s body hangs a sac of marble eggs, and the legs are set wide enough for visitors to walk underneath.

The title is the familiar French word for mother. Bourgeois was direct about the meaning. “The Spider is an ode to my mother,” she said, in a statement Tate quoted when it bought the original. The weaver, the repairer, the patient and protective figure: the spider gathers all the roles of the woman who ran the workshop in Choisy and Antony.

Six bronze casts followed the original. Tate’s announcement of its acquisition, dated 11 January 2008, lists bronzes on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Mori Art Center in Tokyo and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The Bilbao cast, number two of six, was cast in 2001. Tate bought the original while its 2007 retrospective, curated by Frances Morris, was still on view, when Bourgeois was 96.

Late honours, daily work

In 1999 she received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. In 2008 the French president presented her with the Legion of Honour at her house on West 20th Street, where she had lived since 1962. From the late 1980s printmaking had become a daily activity, and it continued to the end: in 2009 she produced sixteen gouache drawings with Tracey Emin, digitally printed on fabric, and in 2010 a fabric book with the poet Gary Indiana.

Louise Bourgeois died on 31 May 2010, at the age of 98. In the same year, an exhibition of her fabric works opened in Venice. The girl who once drew in what damaged tapestries had lost had spent seventy years supplying the absent parts of a single story, and the spider, enormous and protective, is where that story found its clearest shape.