▲ Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois, known as the "mother of American female identity art", was once an idol in the hearts of American feminists. But she herself does not agree with this view: "I have never been a feminist artist, I am just a woman."
▲ Louise Bourgeois
According to Wei Zhen, curator of the Academic Department of Sichuan University Art Museum, project initiator, and young artist, Louise Bourgeois has been using art to trace and heal herself throughout her life. Let’s see what he thinks of bourgeois !
▲ Wei Zhen
Wei Zhen is active in the field of local project art and creates cross-border fusion works with extremely diversified ideas. The works are presented in the form of paintings, installations, performances, videos and theaters with different materials. Through a series of art projects, the works explore individual perception and the boundaries between historical texts and current life.
Works by Wei Zhen ▼
About Louise Bourgeois
First of all, there are some keywords that may be used throughout it. Let’s take a look at it here.
Keywords: emotional injection; return; original emotion; form; era background; self-healing
Facing Bourgeois's works, I am very ashamed, because I am an artist with a very "light" way of creation, and the "heavy" nature of Bourgeois's entangled and profound feelings is not something I can express well. So how do we talk about bourgeois? I have to share with you an animated short film "Love, Death and Robots" that I recently watched.
This is a question about individuals searching for themselves in constant retrospection. Episode 14 talks about a painter who has been transformed by a machine and has become famous. But by chance, he found a blue color that attracted him strongly, so he continued to shape this symbol and color. In the end, he discovered that when he was transformed, part of the machinery and intelligence came from an intelligent robot a thousand years ago - a robot that once cleaned swimming pool tiles, and blue was the color of the swimming pool tiles. So he restored the swimming pool in his last work, and his transformed body decomposed and returned in the swimming pool. Throughout his life, he found the source of his current life. For him, the universe is a small blue tile.
▲ The artist's work in the animation: A touch of blue in the universe
▲ In the end, the artist self-disintegrates and returns to the swimming pool where he once worked.
So there is a discussion about the amount of emotion injected into a work, and there is a case: some artists even pour their entire lives into it.
I first saw Bourgeois's work in Bilbao in 2012: I had just arrived at the hotel and sat in front of the glass window. The wavy Guggenheim Museum and the deformed and twisted black spider, which was different from the appearance of the huge but highly formal museum and was unforgettable at first sight, were just across the river from my hotel. And I had just seen the stunning Hall of the Bulls in the Altamira Cave the day before - a primitive atmosphere, vivid but extremely impactful.
▲ Altamira Cave in Spain, a site of prehistoric human activities. UNESCO included the cave in the World Heritage List in 1985.
This is the view from the hotel, the Guggenheim Museum and the sculpture "Maman".
▲The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is one of the most famous private modern art museums in the world.
When facing "Mother", what attracted me was a deep and original power that is difficult to see in many other works, a power that only a true masterpiece can have. This work allows you to truly perceive and face entanglement, hysteria, vulnerability, pain and profound love.A kind of contradictory combination, all kinds of emotions are deep in it, but no emotion is absolute, strong love, strong loss. Perhaps this is an innate depth that women possess.
You can take a closer look at her entangled and twisted legs, the sense of power due to the entanglement; and the sense of power of the bull in the Bull Hall, the deformation and the protruding stone walls.
▲ Louise Bourgeois' sculpture "Maman"
This is a sculpture that can be entered, rather than placing the two from the perspective of viewing and being viewed. You can enter it and be protected. This spider is so huge and full of power; but the bigger it gets, the more strangely it creates a familiar feeling of alienation. This may be the distance between her and her mother, or it may be the distance between her and herself. Entangled and protected, the protected security of and is intertwined with the fear of being caught. We can look back and think about our relationship with our mothers: deep love but game, control and escape.
The painter in "Love, Death and Robots" is similar to Bourgeois: they both devoted their lives to pursuing "childhood" or even the years before childhood.
▲ Louise Bourgeois: "All my work and all my themes in the past 50 years have been inspired by my childhood."
If we ask what a person is, one interpretation is that a person is the continuation of a series of uninterrupted ideas. Or not just human beings, but how individuals can find some future meaning from past concepts in the present, constantly look back and gradually restore them, and restore a certain strong feeling and state of their own. In Bourgeois' case, there is a strong primitive instinct for identity, which through persistent tempering was finally placed in her work "Mama". What was missing from this intense desire was her own experience. And this experience is not just a verbal experience, but also a pain that goes deep into the bone marrow.
About this spider sculpture, Louise Bourgeois once said: "The spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like the spider, my mother was a weaver. My family ran a tapestry business, and my mother was very smart and managed the workshop like a spider. We know that spiders are good friends of humans because they eat mosquitoes, and mosquitoes spread diseases. So, spiders help and protect us,”
But this is just from her narration, what are the emotions and experiences after this narration? How does her profound pain and love and loss inform her own work? The "pain" and "love" here are not just nouns, but more of the intensity of the emotions she has injected into them. The more you feel and the deeper you feel, the more you need to inject it into your work.
▲ Bourgeois in her youth
We can relate to our own relationship with our mother:
protection - being protected
shaping - leaving
opposition - loving
This biological innate characteristic has been innately implanted in our genes.
The Blue Painter and Bourgeois have one thing in common: they live a long life. The former is of course an illusion of immortality, while Bourgeois's life spanned almost a hundred years (she died at the age of 98). This hundred years brought her an extraordinary inter-era experience.
Let's take a look at the background of Bourgeois' life:
1900 Paris World Expo
1902 Vienna Secession
1905 Paris "The Cage of the Beast"
1907 Picasso " Les Demoiselles d'Avignon "
1910 Milan The first futurist exhibition
In the 20th century Europe, Paris, the cultural center of the world, amidst the isms, the following year (1911), Bourgeois came to the world.
1911 The Qing government fell; Picasso was 30 years old; Qi Baishi retreated to Xiangtan, copying the Eighth National Congress of the CPC, Shi Tao, and Jin Nong; the first Cubism exhibition
In 1911, Bourgeois was born, her father was an antique rug dealer, and her mother repaired rugs, but her birth was not expected - her father just wanted to have a boy.
▲ Louise Bourgeois takes a photo with her family. Bourgeois is the second oldest child in the family and has an older sister and younger brother.
1912 Picasso began to use paper boxes, iron plates, and wires to create
1913 Armory Show
1917 Duchamp's "Fountain"
1920 Dadaism performance
Beuys was born in 1921
At this time, Bourgeois was 10 years old and could begin to perceive the world independently.
▲ Bourgeois with her brother, father, and father’s lover Sadie
In 1922, Bourgeois left a photo with her brother, father, and father’s lover Sadie.
For her, the pain began to plant seeds:
"Can you imagine the atmosphere of despair that filled the family when I was born? I sincerely apologize to my mother for not being a boy..." Regarding childhood, Bourgeois never mentioned it for a long time.
"I had to turn a blind eye to the fact that my mistress lived under the same roof as me, and I had to turn a blind eye to my mother's suffering... so I became extremely disgusted with everything and everyone."
In 1932, Bourgeois was 20 years old , her beloved mother died of a serious illness, and she begged "if I can save my mother's life, I am willing to give up sex" to no avail, committed suicide by jumping into a river, and was rescued by her father. She gave up studying mathematics and philosophy and threw herself into the embrace of art. Legor, he came into contact with sculpture and showed his extraordinary talent.
This intense pain accompanied her for more than ten years from childhood to youth. How did she spend it? What kind of profound pain and love could make her resolutely choose to commit suicide after her mother passed away? The trauma of these ten years stayed with her throughout her life.
Here is a background:
1914-1918 The First World War profoundly changed her father, and he began to like chasing women.
▲ Bourgeois turned to art
1936 Benjamin "Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
In "Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin mainly discusses a series of changes that the development of mechanical reproduction technology has brought to the art field. It has dragged art down from the sacred "altar" that has always been revered by people. While destroying tradition, it has given modern art new characteristics, values and ways of acceptance.
In 1938, she maintained a platonic relationship with Alfred H. Barr (founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Later, Barr introduced her to Robert Goldwater (American art historian), who was doing his doctoral thesis at Harvard at the time. The two married in 1938. Robert's thesis was about primitive art and modern art. Later, Louis followed Robert to New York.
▲ Left: Bourgeois’ wedding photo; Right: Bourgeois with her husband and their three children.
Barr's later resources as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as her husband's research on primitive and modern art, deeply influenced Bourgeois.
In the 1940s, Bourgeois began to emerge as an artist. Since moving to New York, she has been engaged in work related to printing, publications and printmaking; she has systematically studied oil painting and has close contacts with artists at Atelier 17 in New York (a printmaking studio founded by the British printmaker Stanley William Hayter, with which many great artists, such as Rothko, Pollock and Miro), have expanded her artistic language.
1945 Recurring themes in her works: women, houses, medium of work: painting, sculpture; New York, Bourgeois’ first solo exhibition at Berta Fisher Gallery; In the same year, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Calder retrospective; Hiroshima, Nagasaki, atomic bombs
We can see that the "Character Series" works created by Bourgeois in the 1940s and 1950s were her first mature sculptures, which reflected her anxiety, loneliness, and deep nostalgia when she was separated from the people she loved.
▲ Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, ca. 1947-49, white and blue lacquered bronze, stainless steel
▲ Louise Bourgeois, "Dagger" Child), 1947-1949, painted wood
In her early works from Paris to New York, we can see the shadow of Giacometti and Brancusi .
▲ Giacometti’s classic works
Giacometti, the Swiss master of surreal and existential sculpture. The work reflects the fear and loneliness prevalent in people's psychology after the Second World War.
▲ Brancusi "Birds in Space"
Brancusi, a pioneer of modernist sculpture, was one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century.
In 1946, Pollock began splash painting, and New York Abstract Expressionism gave birth to art masters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Crane, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Steele, and a non-realistic painting style emerged.
▲ Works by Jackson Pollock: Reflection of the Big Dipper
▲ Works by Mark Rothko: White Center
Here we can see that even after leaving Paris, Bourgeois still experienced a turbulent era in New York.
The second background is:
1939-1945 World War II
1947 The beginning of the Cold War
In 1947, "Spider" has appeared in Bourgeois's painting. She once compared the process of painting with that of a spider weaving its web: "What is painting? Painting is a secretory process, just like a spider spinning out spider silk to weave its web... It is a weaving process."
At this time, Bourgeois was 36 years old. In fact, compared to her contemporaries, she appeared on the art stage very early due to her social relationship with her husband. But at this time she was just beginning to find the really important topics.
▲ Bourgeois’s home in Chelsea, New York
In 1949, she began to be exposed to sculpture and learned about human figure modeling
1954. She joined the American Abstract Artist Group, whose members included Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt
1956 Pollock passed away
At that time, the artists who studied painting methods after "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Gasnox, Malcolm Morley, Paul Thek, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, shined throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and they are extremely important artists until now. During this period, we still have not seen the emergence of Bourgeois' most important works. It can be said that she has always been outside of various isms and trends.
htmlIn the 1970s, a series of biological forms appeared in her works: nests, refugees, organic worlds and hybrid human bodies, as well as the "misery" of the world.It was not until the first retrospective exhibition held at MOMA in 1982 that she truly stood in front of everyone.
At this time, she was 71 years old.
▲ The scene of the retrospective exhibition of Louise Bourgeois held by MOMA in 1982
1982 The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) held a personal retrospective exhibition for him in 1992
She participated in the 9th documenta in Kassel, Germany, and her works were immediately collected by the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, France.
In 1993, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and the Lyon Biennale
in 1996. Participated in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennale
In 1999, he won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale
and then followed by a series of exhibitions and awards.
But during this period, her truly well-known works had just begun to appear:
In 1990, Bourgeois began to create the "cell" series of installations (cell refers to: cells, bee nests, single rooms, and cells in English). At that time, Bourgeois wanted to make her own architecture and put clothes and old materials in her own buildings, so she came up with the "cell" series.
▲ "Cell (Dark Days)" cell (black days)
In 1991, at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, 80-year-old Bourgeois displayed a group of six works from the "cell" series (cells I-VI), which has since defined the artist's approach to "environmental sculpture". sculpture) a new, positive and revolutionary interpretation. Through the "cell" series of works, Bourgeois brought an unparalleled, extremely challenging and catastrophic sculptural concept. The dense, claustrophobic interior conjures up all kinds of associations. At this time, her big spider has not come out yet.
▲ "Cell 2" Cell II, 1991
Until 1994, Bourgeois created the most famous spider sculpture in her artistic career - the "Mother" series.
"My best friend is my mother, and she is as smart as a spider, patient, dexterous, and useful. She can also defend herself." Bourgeois explained the intention of her creation. However, she seems to have deliberately enlarged the size of the spider to a terrifying level, which implies that she wants her mother to be stronger and more powerful to defend her own interests. In fact, it has become her own emotional satisfaction. You can go and watch her "Mama" live, which is full of raw vitality, entanglement and pain, deep love and hysteria.
htmlAt the age of 83, she returned to the seeds that took root when she was ten to twenty years old, and finally blossomed.At this time, she is still pursuing and creating.
This is her work on paper, still depicting her own mental and perceptual state. Plants and human bodies are everywhere, and pain, the human body, and the mutual repair between plants make her world complex, circuitous, and tortuous, yet abstract and minimalist.
’s works from 1980 to 2009 present us with a mirror looking into the artist’s life. In the mirror is this woman who has never stopped creating, observing, and telling stories. Engravings, fabric paintings, prints, as well as single and series images bear witness to her boundless exploration and experimentation.
She drew inspiration from the research of the 19th-century French neuroscientist and professor of anatomical pathology Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). The Arc of Hysteria creates an emotional and physical space.
▲ Arc of Hysteria, 1993, bronze, polished patina, hanging piece
So why is Bourgeois unique? Both Paris when she was born and New York where she lived later were in the midst of a wave of isms. However, Bourgeois's creative method was not classified into any one ism, but was more inclined to a kind of self-relief and treatment. For her, art is a living history of personal perception. She carried out her life's creation in an autobiographical way, which is almost different from any other artist in the 20th century.
For her, works can truly solve her anxiety and psychological problems, and can present her personal and profound experiences and emotions, which are intangible things (that cannot be perceived by the outside world), in tangible (perceptible) carriers, and ultimately return to her true nature. What creation brings her is a way of survival related to the essence of life.
