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Made from redwood and pine found in the artists Northern California backyard, Jeremy Anderson’s Riverrun (1965 ) was inspired by his fascination with intestinal forms, medical school models, and the elongated figures in old comic books like Plastic Man (1941 – 1956) and Powerhouse Pepper (1942 – 1948).
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The title 32 (painted 1947) references the year Louise Bourgeois’s mother, Josephine, passed away after a long illness. As a teenager, Bourgeois often served as her mothers nurse, and the two were very close. The death precipitated the first of the artist’s two suicide attempts and catalyzed recurring periods of profound depression. In 1959, during an intense period of analysis, she wrote: “after she was dead I said that at least she would not suffer anymore… I put myself in her bed and forbade people to come in her room.” At the center of this paining, an ornate funerary bier is situated as if onstage and illuminated by a spotlight. The curved banister at lower left and window at center right suggest an interior, but the sense of defined space collapses under the blood-red striations arching across the background of the picture plane. An earlier stages of the painting, the enigmatic form at left was a more realistically rendered self-portrait.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
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The Freudian dictum holds that where Id was, there Ego shall be. In Louise Bourgeois‘ terms, the successful realization of a sculpture functions to make conscious what was previously unconscious — that is, repressed and inaccessible — and discharge unwelcome or unmanageable instinctual impulses. Her symbolic forms, like the symptoms of the neurotic, are compromise formations between a wish and a defense.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Louise Bourgeois, Conscious and Unconscious
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The Destruction of the Father is a critical cathartic work in Louise Bourgeois’ artistic development and psychic life. Completed in 1974, the year after the death of her husband, Robert Goldwater, the work is a synthesis of the soft landscapes, poured forms, and sexually explicit part objects that she made starting in 1960. It is also the artist’s first installation piece and looks forward to the Cells of the 1990s.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: The Destruction of The Father By Louise Bourgeois
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Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) began her series of room-like sculptures called Cells in 1991, eventually creating some sixty examples in various sizes and of varying complexity.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Cell VI By Louise Bourgeois