Louise Bourgeois, the French – American artist who died in 2010 at the age of 98, was pure punk. She was best known for her casts of clothes, bodies and meat, but also her incredible large-scale sculptures, like the 30 foot tall spider called ‘Maman’. The reason for its title was that she adored her mother Josephine’s resilience as “a weaver and creator”, and so it was named Mother after her. Her father’s philandering, which she had discovered as a child, really took its psychological toll on her.
I saw this giant arachnid masterpiece at Edinburgh ‘s National Gallery, in 2014, and it was absolutely incredible – it took up most of the room, and dwarfed you when you stood next to it. Her whole exhibition, ‘A Woman Without Secrets’, utterly bewitched me.
She was a force of nature, working and holding art salons right up until her death. I watched a wonderful retrospective documentary on her a few years ago. An art student brought her work to be appraised by Bourgeois at her home salon. “What does this painting represent?” she asked the young woman. She replied,”It’s about the pain of being an artist”. Bourgeois looked her up and down, and spat, “Eet ees not PAIN! Ees PRIVILEGE to be an artist!” She wasn’t kidding.
Her recognition was indeed hard- won. It was only into her fifties that she started to gain real recognition, and she believed that you must live a full life to be a true artist, embracing everything in its entirety: good, bad and everything in-between. She refused to explain what her pieces meant. The obsession with the skin we live in, the crumpled clothes, bones, and figurative, dummy-like sculptures she created were far from pretty, but rather, they represented the energy and complexity of lifeforms, and the space that such items and bodies fill. I see her mischievous, savage humour and rigorous energy in the massive paintings of Jenny Saville, the raw animal sculptures of Nicola Hicks.
I absolutely adored Louise Bourgeois then, and I always will. She was as spiky and complicated as the best of her work. Leave cutesie to the lesser artists. She was a genius, completely focused and fearless.
Maman, 1999,a sculpture in bronze, marble and stainless steel.
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