Centre Pompidou Paris
Until 2 June 2008
Louise Bourgeois, one of the longest-living and greatest avante-garde sculptors, is presenting a fascinating showcase of her work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Its fantasies of revenge, sex and violence represent only a tiny corner of her talents but are of compelling fascination because they were prompted by terrible memories of her childhood.
Louise was born in October 1911 at Paris, where her parents restored antique tapestries. One of her sculptures, made out of pink marble, shows the blade of the guillotine about to fall on the family business, Aux Vieilles Tapisseries, their house with a shop front. Louise hated her life there because her parents had a loveless marriage. In 1922, when she was 11, her father, a complete tyrant, brought his English mistress to live in the house, on the pretext of hiring her as Louise’s governess. She treated Louise cruelly and her mother did nothing, simply refusing to acknowledge what was happening.
The Destruction of the Father
It was not until 1974 that Louise finally purged her hatred of her father by creating a tableau made of plaster, latex, wood, and fabric, lit with a red light. Called ‘The Destruction of the Father’, it depicts the remains of a man devoured by his wife and children at the dinner table. If this were not repellent enough, Louise also made a larger- than-life latex and plaster model of a penis and testicles, called ‘Filette’, which hangs by a metal hook, like a trout for sale in a fishmongers’.
She did not however hate all men. After studying and graduating from the Sorbonne with a mathematics degree in the 1930s, during which her art remained a fringe activity, she met and fell in love with Robert Goldwater, an American art historian and critic. They married in 1938 and Goldwater persuaded Louise to move to New York, where they successfully brought up three children. Although she began exhibiting her work in the 1940s and was a successful Surrealist sculptor in the following decade, it took a retrospective exhibition in 1982 at the Museum of Modern Art to bring her true recognition. In an interview that year Louise revealed the biographical nature of her imagery, unleashing an Oedipalesque scandal that turned her into a celebrity and confirmed her status at the cutting edge of contemporary art. One of her most famous and recent works, Maman, stands outside the Tate Modern in London.
www.centrepompidou.fr
From our April 2008 e-newsletter
