Cade Tompkins Projects

Louise Bourgeois: An
Unfolding Portrait, a
Conversation with
Curator Deborah Wye
Wye provides an expert overview not only of
Bourgeois’s prints and artist’s books, but her work as
a whole.

Christopher Lyon, November 3, 2017

In 1982, as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Louise Bourgeois, “Spider” (1997), steel,
Art, Deborah Wye organized a retrospective exhibition tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber,
devoted to Louise Bourgeois, who was then 70 years silver, gold, and bone. 14ʹ 9ʺ × 21ʹ 10ʺ×
old. It was the museum’s first one-person survey of a 17ʹ, collection The Easton Foundation (©
woman artist in well over 30 years. Later, Bourgeois 2017 The Easton Foundation/Licensed
donated an archive of her printed work to MoMA and, by VAGA, NY)
in 1994, Wye organized an exhibition of Bourgeois’s
prints to accompany the publication of a catalogue raisonné. Over the next 17 years, the artist,
who died in May 2010, produced a vastly expanded body of prints, for which Wye has now
edited a comprehensive online catalogue. The exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding
Portrait, on view at MoMA until January 28, 2018, celebrates that publication.

Wye, now Chief Curator Emerita of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum, and I are
standing in the museum’s yawning Marron Atrium, where an immense spider sculpture in the
center (with a smaller one high up on the wall), and a panorama of large-scale prints, offer a
somewhat intimidating introduction to the exhibition, the balance of which is installed in the
third-floor Edward Steichen Galleries. Wye organized the show and wrote the accompanying

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catalogue, which provides an expert overview not only of Bourgeois’s prints and artist’s books
but her work as a whole.

Christopher Lyon: We’re standing beside “Spider” (1997), which seemed like a good item for
orienting ourselves biographically. It is a steel sculpture of a spider, almost fifteen feet tall,
whose eight legs surround a circular cage-like structure. Hung on its walls, attached to several
frames propped up inside the structure, and draped on a chair at the center of it, are fragments
of faded and tattered tapestry. This work is one of the series of Cells that Bourgeois created over
the last two decades of her career.

Deborah Wye: This is the only one of Bourgeois’s sixty-two Cells that brings together the spider
and cell structure. The symbolism of the spider as Bourgeois’s mother is especially vivid here,
since she was a tapestry restorer by trade. Louise saw the Cells as refuges — she has a chair here
for herself. We have another Cell in the show that also includes a chair. But I think the spider in
this work also conveys an element of entrapment. It shows a kind of ambivalence on Louise’s
part to the role of motherhood.

CL: Wasn’t one of Louise’s earliest jobs as a child filling in drawings on tapestries being
repaired?

DW: It was. Louise’s mother’s tapestry restoration workshop employed about twenty women. As
a child, Louise was asked to draw in missing imagery from the torn and damaged tapestries.
Workers in the atelier would then re-weave those sections.

CL: An interesting aspect of this piece is that the abdomen of the spider hovering above the
enclosure is a kind of basket containing three glass globes, like giant eggs.

DW: Those are the babies. They can be seen as symbolizing both the family that Bourgeois grew
up in, with a sister and brother, and also her own family, since she had three sons.

CL: One could pull at the threads of this show at multiple places. One that occurred to me was a
connection to a work in the show titled “Bosom Lady” (1948), in which the birdlike figure with
Louise’s head and exposed breasts is gazing at a bowl that contains three eggs. So this motif
spans a half century of work.

DW: In the same alcove where “Bosom Lady” is shown, there are the Sainte Sébastienne prints,
which are all self-portraits of Bourgeois. The final versions show a female figure with an exotic,
up-swung hairdo, and in the hairdo are hidden three eggs. Her sons would have been in their
fifties when these prints were made, yet the subject still preoccupied Bourgeois.

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CL: One of your goals in the show, I think, is to show this continuity across Louise’s work.

DW: I’m very interested in the way the

past and present merge. It is evident
throughout the show. Bourgeois will
turn to a theme from an early painting
to create a print fifty years later. Or she
includes a text she wrote in 1947 in a
book from 1990 —   the puritan. She
once said that her memories were her
treasures, but also that she was a
prisoner of her memories.

CL: That’s a big issue with Louise.

DW: Yes, her memories and feelings from

the past remained very powerful. She said
that when she looked at a work made a
long time ago, all the emotions she felt at
that time came rushing back to her.

But if I could say I had an organizing

principle for the exhibition, it would be to
explore Bourgeois’s creative process,
demonstrating how prints played an
integral role in her practice overall. As a
print curator, I’ve always been fascinated
with evolving states that show a
composition developing. That evolution Louise Bourgeois, “Stamp of Memories II” (1994),
disappears under layers of a painting or drypoint, with metal stamp additions. Sheet: 25 3/8 x
drawing. In this exhibition I wanted to 17 1/8ʺ, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift
show her creative process beyond of the artist (© 2017 The Easton Foundation/Licensed
printmaking — that a print could derive by VAGA, NY)Licensed by VAGA, NY)
from a painting or a drawing or a sculpture,
or might inspire a work by her in another medium.

CL: In your book and on the exhibition labels you emphasize the printmakers Bourgeois worked
with. It seems that she was energized by collaboration.

DW: I think she was. In printmaking, the collaboration of artist, printer, and publisher has always
been an essential factor. There is a lot of personal chemistry involved in these relationships. For
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example, the printer Felix Harlan, of the Harlan & Weaver print workshop, not only had
expertise but also a personality that melded well with Bourgeois’s. They worked together for
some twenty years at her brownstone in Chelsea, where she had two small printing presses on the
lower level. He said he’d often prepare a blotter with proofs pulled during the day and leave it on
her table so when she woke up early, she could start working on them. She always wanted to
revise, revise, revise. That process went on and on. She could make twenty or thirty evolving
states and variants for a single composition.

[As we enter the third-floor exhibition galleries, Deborah stops to listen to a recording of
Louise’s voice, heard from a speaker in the ceiling]

DW: You hear her singing here in a kind of rap song she wrote, called “Otte.” I wanted her to be
present in the show. Her voice gives me that.

CL: I was so interested that you started the show with works that are architectural but also
merging the body and constructed forms. You see it over and over again: this attempt to
reconcile geometry with organic forms, the intellect with the emotions. We’re looking now at one
of her most famous images, the “Femme Maison” — a female nude whose head and torso are
enveloped by a house.

DW: Again, this is the past and present coming together: she made the print in the ’80s, but from
imagery of the 1940s. Another compelling example of the embodiment of architecture is seen in
the skyscrapers illustrating the small book He Disappeared into Complete Silence, made in 1947.
She envisioned the buildings as people. If one is standing alone, it’s lonely; if there are two, they
form a couple; if there are three, it means jealousy. She fully personalized these architectural
structures.

CL: Now we are in the alcove devoted to selections from the versions of Sainte Sébastienne,
which we mentioned earlier —

DW: This is just a fraction of the states and variants for Sainte Sebastienne, which she made in
the 1990s. The subject derives from a watercolor of 1947 where she feminizes the Christian Saint
Sebastian for the first time.

CL: And in the early piece, we have a sort of organic figure being attacked by abstract, pin-like
forms. These become arrows in the 1990s versions.

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DW: She felt attacked by inner

feelings — depression, anxiety, anger,
and the like, but also from outside
antagonisms. Here the changes in the
individual proofs reflect how she felt
on any given day. She wasn’t simply
developing formal elements, although
there is always some of that. You’ll
notice that hair is a very important
element. In one proof it is completely
cut off, which certainly represents an
act of violence against herself.

CL: Actually the head also appears to

be severed at the neck in this print.
And in the very large version of Sainte
Sébastienne the head is missing
entirely. What’s with cutting the head
off?

DW: Anger, I’m sure. I was surprised

when I learned that MoMA’s
bookshop planned a poster of that
work. I think it’s kind of scary. But
then some younger women staff
Louise Bourgeois, “Sainte Sébastienne” (1990), drypoint, with
members told me they really like it
hand additions. Sheet: 24 13/16 x 18 1/8ʺ (63 x 46 cm). The
and that to them it represented
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist (© 2017
resistance. So even if a woman’s head
The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY)
is cut off and she is attacked with
arrows, she keeps striding forward!

CL: Unstoppable. Now we’re in the section titled “Forces of Nature.”

DW: Not many people have talked about Bourgeois’s relationship to nature, but it was very
strong and is reflected often in her work. Growing up, she and her siblings each had garden plots
to tend, and she became very familiar with the workings of nature.

CL: Her father had an elaborate garden, right? And animals too? He had like a little zoo there.

DW: Yes, he did. Also, as an adult, when she and her family had a country house in Easton,
Connecticut, she spent time with her children outside, studying nature. 
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[In the center of the gallery where the final section of the exhibition, “Lasting Impressions,” is
presented, there is a suspended sculpture with a glittering bronze patina, “Arch of
Hysteria” (1993), surrounded by visitors taking selfies. It is a headless, life-size nude male figure
bent over backwards so extremely that its extended hands almost touch its heels, making a
golden circle in the air.]

CL: This sculpture brings to mind nineteenth-century psychological theories of female hysteria
and almost seems like a thumbing of the nose to [neurologist Jean-Martin]

Charcot and [Sigmund] Freud.

DW: It’s definitely a reaction against the idea that hysteria is exclusively a women’s problem. In
the nineteenth century, most of the photographs of hysterics in this arched position were of
women. But, now I’m reading that Charcot actually did acknowledge male hysteria, too.

[Also in this final gallery is a series of very large (40 x 60 inches) soft-ground etchings, from the
installation set “À l’infini” (2008), all with extensive additions in mediums including gouache,
colored pencil, and watercolor wash. Wye points out that they all are based on the same
underlying print]

DW: I think this is a spectacular late work. And I also believe that the printed fragments on each
sheet — the twisting, vine-like elements — give the cycle its unity. Those elements create an
almost musical rhythm — a beat that reverberates from sheet to sheet.

Studying Bourgeois’s prints, most of which were made when she was in her eighties and
nineties, got me interested in late artistic styles generally — the styles of artists like Titian,
Rembrandt, Monet, de Kooning. But all of these artists died at different ages, and Bourgeois
lived the longest — until 98. A lot of the art-historical literature about late styles talks about
similarities found among different artists — characteristics like loose brushwork, a sense of
spontaneity, and a tendency toward abstraction. These have been interpreted as evoking
spirituality and transcendence. Bourgeois created this particular project when she was 96 and it
felt to me like it fit into this general discussion of late artistic styles. Here, she seems to be going
back to a primordial state; some see the series as representing the life cycle, from birth to death.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd
Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through January 28, 2018.

198 Hope Street Providence Rhode Island 02906

www.cadetompkins.com cadetompkins@mac.com
Telephone 401 751 4888