Louise Bourgeois. Ulf Küster
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by being
an artist
if you can
if you have it in
you.2
The diaries written in printed calendars with space for personal entries largely reference daily occurrences and are accompanied by reflective comments. This is already the case in her earliest known diary dating from the year 1923, when Louise Bourgeois was eleven years old. She must have been a remarkable child, quite precocious, and she was certainly well-aware of the fact that she was different. She wrote about her depressive “black” thoughts, her “idées noires.” On December 23, shortly before her twelfth birthday, she saw a “light descending the stairs” and alarmed the whole house.3
Particularly revealing is the entry dated December 14, 1923. She was suffering from influenza and wrote, probably under the influence of a high fever:
I despair but can’t find
the strength to think things through
and yet I have quite a lot of things to think about
The people who will read
this diary will certainly think
that this child is too nervous
she has nothing else to do
but sleep play eat, but
not at all I have things to think about
to reflect upon mysteries to dig up
all these worries are not important
to you but for me it isn’t the same.4
While I was reading in the Louise Bourgeois Archive, Jerry Gorovoy took me to see her house again, which largely remained in the state it had been at the time of her death. She seldom left the house during the decade prior to her passing. She rarely entered the room of her husband, the renowned art historian Robert Goldwater, after his death in 1973; she had thus turned herself into a prisoner in her own home. Her bed appeared tiny to me and seemed as if it had been built into a wall of books, primarily nineteenth-century editions of French literature, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and others. The small washstand on a thin mount reminded me of her sculptural group Maisons fragiles from 1978. And Jerry pointed out to me that the house itself is in fact also a “primordial cell,” the model on which she based the spatial installations she characterized as “cells,” with which she was particularly occupying herself in the nineteen-nineties.
I saw remnants of a further “primordial cell” in Paris the following December. It was one of those mysterious places that one frequently chances upon in this city.5 After her birth in 1911, Louise Bourgeois’s family lived for a while in an apartment over Café de Flore, which was later the preferred meeting place of the existentialists from Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s circle. The Maison Louis Bourgeois, the shop for old tapestries operated by her parents, was located in the adjacent house: 174, Boulevard St.-Germain. It is now a bookstore. Louise cordoned off a small section of the store for herself in 1938 and opened an art gallery there, where she sold prints and paintings by Delacroix, Matisse, Redon, Valadon, and Bonnard. The entrance can still be seen in the bookstore’s left show window, and one can still turn the doorknob even though the door no longer opens. Robert Goldwater passed through here shortly after the opening in 1938, and it was here that he met Louise Bourgeois, who would follow him to New York after they married that same year.6 Was this gallery—which, taking the size of the door into consideration, must have been very small—perhaps also a “cell” that served as a kind of trap with which Louise caught her future husband? Those who are intensely occupied with Louise Bourgeois’s art and the world of her ideas will confirm that such thoughts are not plucked out of thin air.
2 Louise Bourgeois in 1938 in her art gallery in Paris
The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, which this little book accompanies, examines how Louise Bourgeois treated her biography and transformed her emotions into objects of art. Characteristic examples of her work are juxtaposed vis-à-vis a selection of classic modern art from the Beyeler Collection. In doing so, Louise Bourgeois’s work is not only embedded in a modernist context, as first accomplished by Alfred Barr when he acquired one of her sculptures in 1951 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, thus adding it to the canon of modernism he had codified. It also becomes increasingly clear that she, in a peculiar fashion, surmounted modern art as an epoch in her oeuvre and bridged the gap to the art of our times and beyond.
During my research, the clipping of an exhibition review published on October 1, 1994 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung fell out of a book I had been perusing. It concerned a Bourgeois exhibition that was then on show at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. Under the heading “Auguste Rodin in Babyland,” the author wrote critically about the artist’s work, concluding his damming review with the sentence: “Every object mutters to itself: ‘I signify something.’” At that time, in 1994, this might have been regarded as a shortcoming. But today it is precisely this diversity of meaning in Louise Bourgeois’s art that is so fascinating: she not only dissolved the antithesis between figuration and abstraction that was long so central to modernism; she also contributed to giving modern art an idiosyncratic layer of interpretation accompanying the purely visible layer. The message of her art remains open to numerous readings. Louise Bourgeois by all means regarded the subjective, open view of her works as correct, writing in a note that probably dates from the late nineteen-eighties:
People ask me—what do
you mean—and I answer
what do you think of when
you see the image.7
The book at hand can be read as a general introduction to Louise Bourgeois’s life and art as well as used as a guide on the journey to Louise Bourgeois’s person and her work as they are presented at the Fondation Beyeler, starting outdoors in front of the museum and ending up deep inside the building’s interior.
3 Installation view, Fondation Beyeler, September 2011
Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999, bronze with silver nitrate patina, stainless steel and marble, 927.1 × 891.5 × 1,023.6 cm, Collection The Easton Foundation, courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read
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