Louise Bourgeois at Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum

The trip to the Guggenheim Museum was a very interesting experience. The museum was a highly unique rotunda building. The plain basic interior of the museum helped to make the artworks standout. Another cool feature was the free audio tour. They provided me with headphones and this device that gave summaries of special artworks. However, the most important part of the event was the Louise Bourgeois exhibit. Louise Bourgeois’ works evoked depressing and curious feelings over me because many represented her childhood memories and struggles of being a woman.

The Louise Bourgeois exhibit consisted of many visual artworks from wood, stone, metal, glass, fabric, and drawings. I thought she was courageous to utilize many different materials to create her artworks. Louise Bourgeois was born in France 1911 and her family worked with tapestries. As a young girl Bourgeois’ job was to draw out the missing parts of old tapestries so weavers could repair the tapestries. Her most compelling works were Femme Maison, Where My Motive Comes From, Le Suicide Threat, Destruction of the Father, Red Room (Parents), and Cell (You Better Grow Up).

Femme Maison consisted of four drawings of women with house-like bodies on their top and their bottom showing female sexual parts, vulnerable and naked. At first the drawings look very bizarre but the explanation helped to show what was the meaning of the pictures. The drawings were to show her struggle in balancing out her different roles as being an artist, wife, and mother. They showed that the identity of women would always be related to domestic responsibilities and impossible to separate.

Bourgeois also had two works that weren’t really drawings but they stuck out to me. In a framed work she wrote, “It’s not so much where I get my motivation from but how it manages to survive.” I could not agree more because she is an old lady now but she still continues to work. There was a time during the 1950’s and 1960s when her artwork was not wanted, but she stilled continued to make creative pieces. During the 1970s was when she really became a successful artist. Le Suicide Threat was another framed work that had words written in red that said, “I love you do you love me?” There was also a picture of a knife-like object. Although it was probably one of the simplest works, I felt emotionally drawn to it. I can imagine the feeling of hopeless and despair she went through when she created this suicide note. Although I don’t know for what was the cause of this, I thought it was one of the most powerful pieces she had.

Destruction of the Father was a large work that was glowing red, filled with white round like balls made of marble. On the table were pieces of white squiggly objects and something that seemed like a head. Although I didn’t get it at first, the artwork was suppose represent a family dinner table. On the table were the father’s body parts that the children took apart. This work was to represent a form of imaginary revenge and anger towards her father. She hated her father for having an affair with her English tutor while her mother tried to ignore it. This was part of the childhood that she could never forget.

The Red Room (Parents) and Cell (You Better Grow Up) were different from the other works because they represented rooms. Red wooden walls covered the Red Room and they the block view to the room. I tried to peek inside the room and it was still impossible to really see what was in there. I think that Bourgeois purposely made the like that because it’s part of her memory. Her parents’ red room was a sort of mystery and curiosity where she couldn’t see inside and would just keep trying to peek. Cell (You Better Grow Up) was a room surrounded with wired fence-like material. There were three round glass jars and each one larger than the other. In the middle of the room was a table with three hands held together and three mirrors were purposely positioned to reflect the image of the hands. I think the three hands and the three glass jars were Bourgeois’ mother, father, and herself. I think the work was meant to show how important family relationships were to the artist but as she grew up her father’s affair ruined that family relationship. This was an exhibit where I felt emotions spilling out of an artist’s work. The Louise Bourgeois exhibit at Guggenheim Museum was a truly a thought provoking experience and gave me a chance to understand parts of the artist’s life that influenced her meaningful artworks.

Le Suicide Threat By Louise Bourgeois