Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

My father used to take me to the Guggenheim a lot when I was young, in a valiant attempt to make me more cultured. At the time, the museum’s saving grace was that it was it was small enough to trudge through in less than two hours. It’s been a long while since the last family museum trip, and last week I visited the Guggenheim for the first time in about 5 years, and I have since realized that I now actually enjoy going there. I went to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibit, and that visit is definitely one I will never forget.

From what I gathered from the audio guide, Louise Bourgeois is a French artist who moved to New York City in the 1930s to continue her artistic studies. She has been prolific ever since, continuing her work even now at the age of 96. With this background in mind, I approached her work with the impression that her collection was one that encompassed her whole life, a “deeper” set of works that was more than just a simple exploration of her artistic capabilities.

The exhibit begins with two spirals hanging from the ceiling of the museum (coincidentally, the museum itself is arranged in a spiral). Spirals are a central motif in Bourgeois’ work, as the audio guide claims that the ambiguity of spirals was representative of her life. One can either escape from the center of a spiral, or become entrapped inside.

The next floor displays some of Bourgeois’ earlier works, including a selection of oil paintings, titled Femme Maison. They are images of distorted women who are trapped inside houses, and are portrayals of Bourgeois’ own life at home, where she herself was “trapped” with a family of four to raise. The next room contains Bourgeois’ wooden sculptures, including an interesting work called Personages, a collection of wooden human-sized sticks placed in locations around the room. They were supposedly representative of the people Bourgeois left behind in France. In that sculpture, I really understood that Bourgeois truly put her life into her work.

Bourgeois’ works became much more intense as I spiraled my way further up the museum. As a struggling female artist, she began to attack the dominant male identity. The Arch of Hysteria, suspended from the ceiling, consisted of a headless male figure bent over backwards. According to Bourgeois, the structure represented hysteria, an emotion commonly her decision to associated with weak women, and make the figure male was a statement against stereotyping.

In my opinion, her most powerful piece was the Destruction of Father, a rectangular box containing a table full of amorphous objects surrounded by ovoid shapes. According to the explanatory blurb, Bourgeois created the piece using the anger she felt towards her father, an adulterous man who had an affair with Bourgeois’ governess, destroying the family in the process. The sculpture portrays the story of a cannibalistic family that kills the father and then eats his body parts. I found the work both gruesome and exciting, and I think it is the most memorable piece in the exhibit.

The exhibit concluded with a collection of Bourgeois’ Cells, large-scale works of enclosed “rooms” containing many of Bourgeois’ personal items, like perfume bottles and shirts. The rooms are dark and claustrophobic, and as Bourgeois puts it, are “architectures of memory”. They are painful and intense, and Cells truly gives the audience an idea of the emotional struggles Bourgeois went through.

The Bourgeois exhibit was definitely memorable. Unlike many other modern exhibits I’ve been to, this one was not a seemingly random collection of “modern” pieces that I could never understand, but a powerful, chronological documenting of Bourgeois’ emotional ups and downs. I could understand the frustration she felt towards the father, and could sense the feelings she later experienced of being trapped. The collection was provocative and fascinating, and I definitely recommend that everyone go take a look at it.