Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

Louise Bourgeois died on May 31. Although she is one of my favorite sculptors, her death didn't attract much notice. Looking at her Wikipedia entry, I'm bemused to see her characterized as "the founder of confessional art." (What does that mean?)

Over the years, I saw pieces of hers here and there, in different museums in different cities, and of course had the pleasure of staring at images of them in print. And then-- I'm not sure when-- I had the startling experience of seeing a small show of her work at the Henry Gallery, here in Seattle. And I was shocked (and pleased) by the effect it had on me. Although the Wikipedia entry pays a lot of attention to her more recent spider pieces, back then I was swept away by the sensuality of some of her more shapely pieces (and creeped out by her earlier paintings, for more of which, see below). Several pieces of sculpture deeply moved me, though one in particular absolutely obsessed me. I can't tell you how hard it was to resist touching its marble curves. (It wasn't enclosed in glass!) The effect was tremendously erotic. This was one of those rare instances when I was visiting the exhibit on my own. Under the circumstances, I was glad for that.

As for the work that creeped me out: in the 1940s, Bourgeois produced a series of paintings that today are easily understood as feminist, though critics of the day took them for something else. Here's Whitney Chadwick on them:

The nexus of body/home/art is central to the early work of Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911) whose femme-maison paintings were exhibited in 1947. Although Bourgeois pointed to the home as a place of conflict for the woman artist, critics read the paintings as affirming a "natural" identification between women and home. Her paintings of 1947 evolved out of earlier ones based on the grid, a structural form familiar to her from her early weaving and tapestry, an from her training in Cubist abstraction. Under the influence of Surrealism, she developed the personal, quasi-figurative imagery of these femme-maison paintings with their houses perched on top of women's bodies in place of heads. In these disquiesting works, domesticity, imaged through blank facades and small windows, defines women but denies them speaking voices. "Hers is a world of women," writes one critic. "Blithely they emerge from chimneys, or, terrified, they watch from their beds as curtains fly from a nightmare window. A whole family of females proves [sic] their domesticity by having houses for heads." (Women, Art, and Society, 303-304)

It can come, then, as no surprise that Bourgeois participated in the feminist uprising of artists in the 1970s. Astonishingly, according to obituaries, Bourgeois continued working right up until her death.

Here are the obituaries I've seen:

Holland Cotter, Louise Bourgeois, Artist and Sculptor, Is Dead (New York Times)

Jennifer Peltz Arist Louise Bourgeois dies in NYC at 98 (AP)

Jennifer Peltz Sculptor Louise Bourgeois Plumbed Depths of Female Psyche, Made Giant Freaky Spiders (Christian Science Monitor)

Michael McNay Louise Bourgeois obituary (The Guardian)

Finally, Bourgeois herself: here's an excerpt of Rachel Cooke's interview of Bourgeois, October 2007:

RC: The main focus of your work, according to some, is the relationship between an entity and its surroundings. But you have also been influenced by human relationships. Can you explain more about this aspect of your work?

LB: My works are portraits of a relationship, and the most important one was my mother. Now, how these feelings for her are brought into my interaction with other people, and how these feelings for her feed into my work is both complex and mysterious. I'm still trying to understand the mechanism.

RC: In the Fifties and Sixties, the art market ignored you a little. Was this frustrating? Was it connected to your sex? How and why did things change?

LB: The Fifties were definitely macho and the Sixties less so. The fact that the market was not interested in my work because I was a woman was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to work totally undisturbed. Don't forget that there were plenty of women in a position of power in the art world: women were trustees of museums, the owners of galleries, and many were critics. Surely, the Women's Movement affected the role of women in the art world. The art world is simply a microcosm of the larger world where men and women compete.

RC: Today, your most famous works might be your 'spider' structures. Is this pleasing? Can you talk a little about how they came about?

LB: The spiders were an ode to my mother. She was a tapestry woman, and like a spider, was a weaver. She protected me and was my best friend.

RC: Your parents worked with tapestry, and you initially studied mathematics. Some critics have traced both these influences in your work. How separate is the mathematician in you, from the artist, or are the two intimately connected?

LB: My love of geometry is expressed by the formal aspect of my work. From the tapestries, I got this large sense of scale. I learned their stories, the use of symbolism and art history. The restoration of the tapestries functioned on a psychological level as well. By this I mean that things that have broken down or have been ripped apart can be joined and mended. My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.

Marian Roscoe Sussex (1916-2007)

A EULOGY

By Lucy Sussex

My mother Marian Roscoe Sussex died on 13 July 2007. She was an artist and lifelong feminist, mother, unconventional Christian, charity worker, wife and writer—in no particular order. Like many older women, she was gifted at anecdote, and told stories of her life. And from her words I draw a portrait; as she drew me.

Everybody is a product of their nature and nurture, time and place. From the hindsight of the 21^st century, we think those born 90 years ago lived in interesting times, in the Chinese sense of a curse: 2 world wars, the depression, then the cold war. Yet Marian was part of an extraordinary generation, who were interesting, tough, adaptive people precisely because of those times.

James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) was her contemporary, and there were similarities and also differences in their lives. They both came late to their true careers, both suffered greatly from depression and prescription medicine, and also from the roles that society had mapped out for them. Intelligent, gifted girls had a tough deal in the early 20^th century, both in the US and my mother’s Australia.

Marian Roscoe Wilson, b. 1916 in Melbourne, Australia to a father, Alfred, who would be a major force in Melbourne Anglican (in the US Episcopalian) Church, ending as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, and a mother, Florence Hearn, from a large country family, a woman of determined character. Marian was the 2^nd daughter, which was very important. As a small child, overhearing her mother lamenting her lack of sons had a profound effect on her. At the very least it radicalized her in terms of gender politics: she would use the term ‘second-class citizen’. Thus she couldn’t, because of her sex, follow in her father’s footsteps. Had she been male, she might have made a somewhat heretical Vicar. [At this point the Vicar conducting the funeral service smiled in agreement--the Rev. Janet Turpie-Johnstone is not only female but of Australian aboriginal descent]. Gender also meant that she didn’t, as was the case with young men of her generation, fight in World War II, from which so many came home scarred or not at all.

Vignette 1: a young Australian woman finds herself in Salisbury, and from there walks to Stonehenge, in high heels. She has the monument entirely to herself. Because, on that day, World War II is declared.

That’s very novelistic, but it’s real life, true.

She knew before then that she wanted to be an artist. But the life of art is never easy, and certainly no way to earn a living in the midst of the Great Depression. Vicar’s daughters do not have independent incomes. One of her art tutors told her, decades later: ‘You could have been a Grace Cossington-Smith’—a major Australian stylist, now highly collectable. It was not something about which she was bitter. She appreciated her children, and the art she belatedly did.

Instead of following her natural inclination, she excelled academically, winning a scholarship to Melbourne University. She might have been a Don—or she might have been a Vicar’s wife, like her mother, for she got engaged to a Divinity student. The two occupations were probably not compatible. In any case they ceased to be options in her final degree year. Broken engagements do not make for high marks.

Vignette 2: a young woman, who is desperately unhappy, visits a Fortune teller—who tells her she will marry at 25 and never have to worry about money. Which turns out to be a perfectly accurate prediction. More novelistic but true stuff.

Back in Melbourne, she meets Ronald Sussex at a dance and they marry. She becomes an academic wife, a hard-working and supportive sector of womanhood. It means: going anywhere the jobs are, entertaining the vice-chancellor to tea, and in the days of year-long sabbatical leave, managing a household with children, overseas and on the road in foreign countries. I don’t know how she did it.

She had children, which she approached in a similar supportive but also creative spirit. She wanted to make something special for her first-born, my brother Roland, but it was wartime and fabric was rationed. The only fine woolen fabric she could get was khaki. So my brother ended up resplendent in khaki smocked in bright yellow and red—showing her sense of colour. Whatever we wanted to do, vocation-wise, she was there for us. Not many mothers would let a sixteen-year-old girl, my sister Polly, go to Prague to study cello. With me she corrected my grammar when I started writing, and told me my sentences were too staccato. None of this: that’s nice dear, if it plainly wasn’t. She knew when to criticize, and when to hold back.

It wasn’t until we moved to the tropics that she got what Virginia Woolf described as essential for a creative woman: a room of her own. It was a studio for her, where she worked first alone, then with a tutor, David Rainford. He told her when her art was too pretty-pretty, and encouraged her to draw with strength. Only when my father retired did she achieve her ambition of going to art school. Not many people do that at 60. She graduated, and became a printmaker, exhibiting locally and overseas.

She also did what many people think is very easy but is in fact very hard: wrote and illustrated a children’s book for her eldest granddaughter, Nicola, which was of professional standard and got published: The Magic Billy.

The unpleasant irony is that after 8 years printmaking chemicals gave her cancer of the throat. But though she gave up her printmaking, she made something positive of it. She always did that. She turned to using pastels, instead.

Last vignette. A woman artist in her 70s is invited to a church celebration, where her first love, an Anglican cleric, will be officiating. Also present is a famous former parishioner, later one of Australia’s best poets: Gwen Harwood. They are quite remarkably alike, these two women, and the cleric tells the poet’s biographer, who is present: ‘I loved them both!’ It is the first and only time the three corners of this old love triangle meet.

Again, another moment that is almost too novelistic to be true.

Novels are hard to end, and so are lives. Another Tiptree comparison—they both, at the end of their lives, found themselves caring for older husband with dementia, and in different ways it killed them. Ten months after my father died, my mother followed, worn out and suffering the belated effects of her cancer treatment. ‘Death is the price we pay for life and for all life,’ Ursula Le Guin wrote in a book my mother loved, THE FARTHEST SHORE. She paid it peacefully.

The mind replays memories, sometimes in creative ways. As a writer, I don’t like ghostly visitations in dreams as a plot device. Dreams are more inevitably more about the dreamer than what they dream about. Nonetheless several nights ago I dreamt I saw Marian. She stood in a half-open doorway, an interior scene. What was in the room behind her was uncertain. She looked out from behind her big glasses, then slowly closed the door. I woke at that point, so retained the dream, and mulled over it. “In my father’s house are many mansions?”—to be Biblical. ‘A room of one’s own?’—to be feminist. In either case, an artist’s studio.