The Art of Louise Bourgeois Essay Example

she amalgamated bronze sculptures and traditional marble alongside the daily objects that were filled with strong emotional charge like empty bottles, furniture and clothes, drawings, hand-stitched works, printings that were made of fabric. Originally, Louise studied geometry and mathematics at Sorbonne but later in 1932, she switched to art. It was upon her marriage that she moved to New York in 1938 to Robert Goldwater who was an American art historian. She progressed with her artistic practice in America even though the career developed very slowly (Walsh & Maria 24).

The retrospective modern art museum made out of her own efforts in the 1982 when she was already seventy years acted as a turning point to her. In the interview that matched with the opening, Louise narrated that the imagery in her art that dealt with themes like violence, betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, sexual desire and fear was autobiographical and also a form of catharsis. Her first sculpture was made in 2000 and it was to become an iconic series of maman that was a giant spider.

Her most famous and largest sculpture the maman which is the affectionate name used by the French people for mother exploded up in different locations all over the world. This brought up disagreement and at the same time respect every time it appeared. It also had alarming feet of thirty and a spell at river Thames banks that was outside the Tate in London this was before it took up a place in the outside part of Guggenheim Bilbao. In its union, the sculpture was divided especially where it was connected with the associations of maternal and of arachnids that Louise focused on. Maybe,

maman was the one that brought culmination of this theme of arachnid that Louise had initially contemplated in just the drawing of the charcoal and an ink the year 1947 hence progressing with her sculpture spider in 1996 (Racz & Imogen 145).

Maman with its marble eggs that were seventeen in total stayed in a sac that was wired and it hanged in a cavity of under-body structure that looked very huge. This was alludes and emotionally aggressive to the mother of Louise together with the metaphors of protection, weaving and spinning. Louise always narrated that the spider was the same as her mother. She said that her mother was her best friend. In relation to a spider, Louise’ mother was also a weaver. According to her, spiders are always clever and she compared this with her mother saying that her mother was clever as spiders. Just like the way mothers are very helpful and protective, spiders are also friendly presences and they eat mosquitoes that spread diseases.

The widespread protection theme is in most cases related to images of home and shelter just like the way bourgeois combined the mediums of arts with her traumas and personal conflicts. In the series of cells, installation of windows, old doors, found objects and steel fencing were for her childhood evocations that she considered being supernatural supply of her work in art. That is why she publically and freely narrated about her initial emotions that brought up confusions in her family life. One of them was her affectionate and the influenza that caught her mother Louise was still young, the domineering disposition, marital infidelities of the father, unending mystery during her childhood, magic, and drama.

Her investment

through emotions in the art work she dealt with was very exceptional and famous within the industry of art (Collier et al 101). The drawings of bourgeois in her years played with reality and art with daring. On top of that, the therapists of modern art together with their patients had great in the pioneering work of Bourgeois. A section of the work of Bourgeois is the hidden emotion and childhood distress. This is a topic that artist said about uninhibited.

It was after the mother to Bourgeois becomes infected with influenza that her father started other affairs with Sadie who was an outside woman and the English tutor of Bourgeois.  According to her, this was the time when she started having double standard engagement that was associated to sexuality and gender and she even expressed it much in her art work. She even spoke of how her father could tell the mother the way he loved her despite the infidelity. In fact, sexuality theme is very prominent and important to Louise. Even if they seem to be very aggressive, the sculpture of bourgeois tend to shape the themes of fragility, insecurity and protection to formulate great symbolic ideas that put much emphasis on the correlation of unconscious through which she became very fascinated. Bourgeois used art to recreate and re-narrate the history of cell after taking the relationship between the sexuality roles and those of her parents during her childhood that acted as an inspiration.  Some parts of the series of cells directly indicate the insecurity and trauma that surrounded bourgeois during her childhood due to the unstable situation of her family (Tognoli et al 323).

The suggestive, anthropomorphic and frequently attractive shape that sculptures

of Bourgeois had assumed that the male and the female bodies are progressively reformed to almost unrecognizable bodies. All these assumptions are always compared with the innocence and sexuality and there are times when disagreements come in between the two. The bubbling rolls that look to be fresh and smother act as a sign of a lifeless woman with muscles that are flexible and they suggest that the woman is still alive.  The ability of Bourgeois to alter her whole life into bronze, rubber and stone work is the exact thing that made her a good example to the future artists especially the female one.  In the world of art where women were treated as citizens of second class and they were not supposed to deal with matters concerning sexual subject, bourgeois assumed that there was presence of an emblematic in the fearless work of Louise. There are people who interpreted her sculptures as self assurance fumiest statement and her career as an example of art that was made from painful efforts.

The sensual but repulsive, the representation of the body, fragmented and often androgynous of Bourgeois that secured her life style as unrepeatable and unforgettable talent. The cells that w ere caged had unique and very important items, clear sexual but sculptures with worrying androgynous in an expressive and unusual method, sculptures in wool, latex, and bronze and stone and Bourgeois was not afraid of that. On top of that, she had some obvious sculptures that were exhibited most by the natural study that took place in 1984 and that had a sphinx without a head but had very strong claws and breasts were multiple. Maybe, the most challenging one was

the fillette of 1968 that was disturbingly interpreted as a girl who was still young. The detached latex phallus which was also very large was provocative and suggestive in interpretation of latent distrust and sexuality of the bodies of male that maybe stemmed from her childhood memories of the affairs of her father. The nightmarish tableau she had in 1974 is an example of these feelings which had the title of her father’s destruction. This was meant to explore the psychological power of a father (Parker & Rozsika 233).

The table she featured with a room that looked like a womb was made to look like either a bedroom or a dining room. It was in this piece where soft materials were used by Louise I large scale. Since it was out of fabric, plaster, wood, latex lights in red color, the installation was designed to resemble something that appears or what comes out after a certain crime has been committed. In this room, there was bumps that looked like breasts, a phallic swelling and some other suggestive shapes of sexuality put in a manner that they seemed to be so soft and they all suggest the giving up of a father who is overbearing. According to the suggestions made by bourgeois, the inspiration of tableau arose from ones desire since her childhood stage and the pompous father and his presence reduces hour of dinner every day and is even pulled by other members of the family on the table, dismembered and afterwards gobbled up.

It was Bourgeois career that made great changes forever in the industry of art and it had a very big impact on the psychoanalysis discussions, appearance and at a great

extent critically the female artists place around the large male industry that is majorly focused upon. Since  the beginning to the end, the sculpture of bourgeois shared themes that paid much attention to the body of a human being and its requirement for the protection and nurture in the world that is frightening and the one that affects the disproportionately of females. Her work subverted and challenged expectations, making the spectators to silence and come up with a conclusion the the female sexuality issues and its weaknesses observed her emphatic and surrealist sculptures. She was therefore considered to be among the strongest artists in history. People like Eva Hesse were drastically influenced by her.

Work Cited

• Walsh, Maria. Art and Psychoanalysis. , 2013. Print.
• Racz, Imogen. Art and the Home. I B Tauris, 2013. Print.
• Collier, Peter, Anna M. Elsner, and Olga Smith. Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.
• Tognoli, Pasquali L, and Salo F. Thomson. Women and Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Glimpse Through Art, Literature, and Social Structure. , 2014. Print.
• Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. England: I B Tauris & Co, 2010. Print.