CulBeat Express
2017.08.07 18:10
MoMA 루이스 부르주아 판화전(9.24-1/28, 2018)
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MoMA EXPLORES LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S PRINTS AND BOOKS, A LITTLE KNOWN
YET INTEGRAL COMPONENT OF HER PRACTICE
With Some 300 Works, the Survey Sheds New Light on Bourgeois’s Creative Process and
Places Her Prints and Illustrated Books in the Context of Related Sculptures, Drawings,
and Paintings
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
September 24, 2017-January 28, 2018
Floor Three, The Edward Steichen Galleries, and Floor Two, The Donald B. and Catherine C.
Marron Atrium
NEW YORK, August 7, 2017?The Museum of Modern Art’s Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding
Portrait, on view September 24, 2017, through January 28, 2018, is the first comprehensive
survey of Bourgeois’s prints and illustrated books. It places these mediums within the context
of the artist’s overall practice and sheds new light on her creative process. The exhibition
includes 265 prints (including those in books and series), 23 sculptures, nine drawings, and
two early paintings. Louise Bourgeois is organized by Deborah Wye, Chief Curator Emerita of
the former Department of Prints and Illustrated Books?a longtime friend of the artist's and a
leading scholar of her work?with Sewon Kang, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings
and Prints.
Louise Bourgeois (1911?2010), a celebrated sculptor who worked in multiple mediums, was
motivated by emotional struggle. Through art, she made her emotions tangible and sought to
understand and cope with painful memories, jealousy, anger, anxiety, loneliness, and despair.
Art was her tool of “survival,” she said, and her “guarantee of sanity.” This exhibition highlights
the themes and motifs that served as visual metaphors for Bourgeois and recur in her artistic
practice across seven decades. They vary from architectural forms to growth and germination
in nature, from the human body and sexuality to motherhood, and even include symbolic
abstraction. Her illustrated books bring attention to another of Bourgeois’s little-known
creative outlets: her highly evocative writings, which form the texts for these volumes.
“Her prints and their evolving states of development are especially revealing as they provide
the opportunity to see Bourgeois’s imagination unfold,” says exhibition curator Deborah Wye.
“To view such sequences is akin to looking over the artist’s shoulder as she worked.”
The creation of multiple examples of the same composition is fundamental to printmaking,
and this encouraged Bourgeois to re-envision her imagery in myriad ways by embellishing her
prints with gouache, watercolor, pencil, and ink to reflect her changing moods. She also
benefited from printmaking’s collaborative nature, which often entails the encouragement of
publishers and the assistance of expert technicians. Bourgeois’s printmaking relationships
could lift her spirits, and the work she accomplished with her collaborators in her
home/studio on 20th Street in Manhattan was creatively energizing.
The entire body of Bourgeois’s printmaking comprises some 1,200 individual compositions,
and constitutes a major component of her work overall. She created prints in two periods of
her career.
In the 1940s, she was an active printmaker and painter; she transitioned to
sculpture only late in the decade. At that time, while raising three small children, she often
made prints at home on a small press. She also frequented Atelier 17, a renowned print
workshop that had relocated from Paris to New York in the war years. When Bourgeois turned
definitively to sculpture, she left painting behind, but returned to printmaking many decades
later, in the late 1980s. During the 1990s and 2000s?when Bourgeois was in her eighties and
nineties?she made prints a part of her daily practice. She resurrected her old printing press
from the 1940s, and eventually added a second, both located on the lower level of her
home/studio.
The thematic sections of this exhibition bring together prints from both periods of
Bourgeois’s engagement with the medium. They also include related sculptures, drawings,
and early paintings, to underscore her overarching concerns. She saw no “rivalry” between
the mediums in which she worked. Instead, she said, they allowed her “to say same things, but
in different ways.”
Architecture Embodied
In pursuit of emotional balance and stability, Bourgeois often made use of visual symbols
derived from architecture. Her early study of mathematics may have attracted her to the
rationality of the built environment. Yet the idiosyncratic structures she created often exhibit
human features or reflect personal vulnerabilities. In prints and in early paintings, they
become “actors” in invented narratives, sometimes standing alone, but also interacting in
pairs or groups, as in the illustrations for her celebrated book He Disappeared into Complete
Silence. Architectural structures and room-like chambers could express safety and refuge for
Bourgeois, but also entrapment, as seen in her early Femme Maison imagery or her later
sculpture Cell VI.
Abstracted Emotions
Bourgeois is best known for huge Spider sculptures and provocative figures and body parts,
but her art also incorporated abstract forms throughout her long career. Straight lines,
curves, circles, grids, and an array of biomorphic formations are found in all the mediums in
which she worked. In Lullaby, her array of abstract shapes superimposed on the horizontal
lines of music staves conjures up an imagined musical score. Bourgeois employed such forms
for the function they served within a complicated psychological domain. Abstraction could be
calming, with repeating forms or strokes, or offer a sense of stability through geometry, but it
also expressed tension and anger.
Fabric of Memory
Bourgeois was raised in a family of tapestry restorers, but introduced fabric into her art only
when she reached her eighties. Deciding she no longer needed all the clothes she had saved
for years, or the household fabrics she stored, she began to incorporate dresses, slips, and
coats within her sculptures, and to cut up cloth for stuffed figures and patterned collages.
Bourgeois also began to make prints on fabric, enjoying the tactile qualities of the surfaces
and the way they absorbed ink. She went on to create fabric books, such as Ode a l’Oubli,
using old linen hand towels from her trousseau as pages, filled with abstract designs made
from bits of garments.
Alone and Together
Throughout her career, Bourgeois employed the human figure as self-portraiture, as seen
here in the provocative Sainte Sebastienne. She also depicted her relationships with others
through figurative symbolism, such as the representations found in Self Portrait, which
features one of her sons between his two parents. The figure, she said, helped “dissolve or
appease my anxiety,” and her highly inventive imagery often combines elements of the real
and the surreal. After intense psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s, Bourgeois turned more
directly to the physicality of the body, including an explicit sexuality; she examined a
female/male continuum, and interactions between men and women. She also explored
motherhood, from birth to its inevitable interdependencies.
Forces of Nature
Bourgeois was a keen observer of nature from childhood on, and was familiar with a wide
variety of plants, flowers, shrubs, and fruit-bearing trees. Although she lived in New York as an
adult, she spent summers at a country house in nearby Connecticut. There, as a young
mother, she enjoyed interacting in nature with her three sons. In her art, she often found
human correspondences in such elements as wind, storms, and rivers, or seeds and
germination. And she related the body to the topography of the Earth, expressing an ongoing
mutability between natural and bodily forms, as evident in the undulating hills of Lacs de
Montagne ("Mountain Lakes").
Lasting Impressions
In the last years of her life?between the ages of 94 and 98?Bourgeois developed a highly
innovative form of printmaking on a large scale, with the soft ground etching technique and
extensive hand additions with brushes and pencils. The exhibition features the installation set
A l’Infini, a landmark of that period, demonstrating what might be characterized as
Bourgeois’s final “late style.” Here she creates a spontaneous, flowing, and tumultuous
abstract world, suggesting primordial beginnings. Babies, a nude, and an entangled couple
emerge from this whirling domain and call to mind many earlier figurative works by the artist,
such as the bronze Arch of Hysteria.
Marron Atrium Installation
A series of large-scale soft ground etchings, completed when Bourgeois was in her midnineties,
represents a period when her printmaking flourished. These works exhibit one of her
singular visual strategies: the creation of highly suggestive yet abstract forms. They also
highlight a recurring theme of the natural world, with curvilinear lines and organic shapes
calling to mind seeds, roots, vines, flowers, hanging fruit, and sheaves of wheat, while
sometimes hinting at parts of the body. One such example is Accumulations. The spider is a
creature of nature that Bourgeois called “a friend” when it caught bothersome mosquitoes.
But she also saw this crafty arachnid in symbolic terms, as representing her mother, a
tapestry restorer. That reference is vividly represented in the exhibition by her massive Cell
sculpture, Spider.
Audiovisual Components
Bourgeois’s recording Otte is presented at the entrance of the exhibition. She sings her own
invented lyrics?wordplays on French words and their masculine and feminine endings. To a
rap beat, she contrasts the power of men and of women as communicated by the structure of
language.
The exhibition also features a film clip from Louise Bourgeois: La Riviere Gentille, showing
Bourgeois with Ode a l’Oubli, a fabric book she made in 2002, with pages made from
monogrammed linen hand towels saved from her trousseau. (She married in 1938.) She filled
this book with fabric collages made from bits and pieces of her old garments; stains,
scorches, and cigarette burns testify to their histories. In the clip, Bourgeois is seen turning
the book’s pages, patting and smoothing them as she views the volume from beginning to end.
The film will be on view alongside the fabric book.
Bourgeois Archive at MoMA and Online Catalogue Raisonne
In 1990, Louise Bourgeois promised an archive of her printed art to the Museum, consisting
of all the prints and illustrated books in her possession at that time, and the promise of an
example of each new print going forward. MoMA now has in its collection some 3,000 printed
sheets by the artist, a unique resource for the study and understanding of her artistic vision
and creative process.
This vast archive of Bourgeois’s prints, as well as all others she created in the medium, is now
accessible online through the highly innovative, interactive website Louise Bourgeois: The
Complete Prints & Books (moma.org/bourgeoisprints). Edited by Deborah Wye, this site
presents Bourgeois’s work thematically, placing her prints in the context of related
sculptures, drawings, and early paintings. It also offers numerous access tools, including
searches by chronology, technique, format, publisher, and printer. Special features allow for
comparing works and zooming in on details. The website will be available to Museum visitors
during the course of the exhibition at a special computer kiosk and seating area.
