If you have visited Tokyo, you may have seen a huge spider sculpture made by Louise Bourgeois, standing in the Roppongi Square. Louise Bourgeois, a French-American female artist, exhibited her sculptures all over the world.
Her iconic spider sculptures can be seen at several places, the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, Canada, at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and at the Tate Modern in London, England. This legendary artist is regarded as one of the important promoters of feminism movement after the 1970s.
Look back to Louise Bourgeois' works, her childhood is crucial to how she created. Even more, it is the motivation that allowed her to join the feminist movement. Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and named after her father, Louis, who had wanted a son. Soon, the fact that her father had an affair with her tutor lead to tensions in the household. After her mother died of illness, Bourgeois attempted to suicide by jumping into a river and was rescued by her father. Suffering from the loss of her mother, Bourgeois, who originally studied philosophy and mathematics, decided to learn painting. In the 1930s, she began to study painting in Paris where she made friend with Duchamp the artist. Then She met her husband in her printing workshop and moved with him to New York in 1938.
When she was in New York, Bourgeois tried to make prints and met some American abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. While she was getting mature, her works began relating to her childhood.
Bourgeois’ works are full of severe anxiety for she was resentful of her father. Her topics are often with the meaning of death, betrayal, and loneliness. Take her notable work "The Destruction of the Father ", for example. The work was also Bourgeois’ first to explicitly reveal her anger over her father's infidelity, which was an underlying motivation for much of her work.
However, her childhood also encouraged Bourgeois to create spider sculptures which are representations of her mother. To be honest, spiders always made people dreadful. But, Bourgeois thinks that spiders have the fascinating qualities of wisdom, thoughtfulness, and patience. Just like a mother trying to protect her child. As a textile worker, her mother has qualified the image of spiders. For Bourgeois, creation is a process of facing painful memories and then relieve her inner resentment and trauma by working.
Of course, in addition to the iconic spider sculptures, Bourgeois was an important pioneer in the feminist movement of the 1970s. She turned the negative emotions that were patriarchal in childhood into internal driving forces. Her artworks involved physical problems of male and female, highlighting the sensitive issues between the two genders. For example, Bourgeois' masterpiece "Fillette" challenges the patriarchal society with a huge male reproductive organ. The sculpture is not only like reproductive organs but a woman's neck and breast. This is how Bourgeois questioned and experimented on the body and genders. Emphasis on the image of sexuality continues to appear in her later creations and has become an important support for feminist social movements.
Looking back at Bourgeois’ life, she had always been resisting and thinking about the unfair balance between genders and even supporting homosexuals and transgenders in her later years. Although her style of creation can be scary and ironic, it also provides comfort and protection for the world.
In 1955, Bourgeois represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In 1982, Bourgeois held her first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This is the first time that the museum has held a retrospective exhibition for female artists. Undoubtedly, she set a new milestone in the art world. In 2001, Bourgeois was the first living American artist to exhibit at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Well goes an English proverb, “Live and learn.” Bourgeois was an excellent example of the saying. Although she worked over 60 years, she still insisted to create until a week before she died. It not only tells how Bourgeois strong is but also how art is a great comfort to her.
Bourgeois’ works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.
The Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai will hold Louise Bourgeois' first large-scale museum exhibition in China. The show offers a focused survey of major works from the artist’s entire career, including Personage sculptures from the late 1940s, Cell installations from the 1990s, the fabric works of her final decade, and the monumental spider sculpture Maman. The exhibition is organized by the Long Museum in collaboration with The Louise Bourgeois Studio and will continue to travel to Song Art Museum in March 2019.
Louise Bourgeois: The Eternal Thread
Exhibition Date: 3 November 2018 - 24 February 2019
Venue: The Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai
Ticket: to be announced
Figure 1：Louise Bourgeois's work in front of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, photo by YIART.
Figure 2 left：Fillette, 1968, 59.7 x 28 x 19.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art Collection© The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Figure 2 top middle：Louise Bourgeois in her studio with Pass in 1988. Photo: © Claudio Edinger/Art: © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY
Figure 2 front middle：Spider, Collection The Easton Foundation © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Maximilian Geuter Artist: Louise Bourgeois Steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold and bone, 449.6x665.5x518.2(cm), 1997
Figure 2 top right：Arch of Hysteria, Collection The Easton Foundation © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Christopher Burke Artist: Louise Bourgeois Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece, 83.8x101.6x58.4(cm), 1993
Figure 2 bottom right：Cell XX (Portrait), Collection Louise Bourgeois Trust © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Christopher Burke Artist: Louise Bourgeois Steel, fabric, wood and glass, 188x124.5x124.5(cm), 2000
