“Drawings are thought feathers, they are ideas that I seize in mid-flight and put down on paper.”
Spanning the duration of her extraordinary career and referencing a multitude of her evocative motifs, the present group from the collects ion of John Cheim encapsulates Louise Bourgeois’s intimate and arresting artistic explorations through the medium of paper. Bourgeois’s dreamlike and expressive compositions demonstrate her career-long attachment to image while allowing a glimpse into her personal psyche. Drawing has been a consistent fixture in Bourgeois’s artistic process, a sort of private diary through which she records her “pensées plumes,” or feather thoughts, as she calls them – visual ideas that she captures in mid-flight and fixes onto a highly varied range of substrates. Through drawing she articulates the complex memories and images of her past that emerge into consciousness, called up by intense emotions and articulation reflected on the sheet.
Expressed through recurrent motifs (including body parts, spirals, and spiders), the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre – employing a variety of genres, media and material – plays upon the powers of association, recollects ion, fantasy, and fear. For Bourgeois, catharsis was achieved through her artmaking. Her works on paper at large grapple with lifelong anxieties and confront complex childhood memories and latent emotions; the result is a poetic and nostalgic body of drawings that provoke a deep emotional response.
In Les Beaux Blancs (1997), bound locks of hair and the nape of a neck become a rumination on girlhood and innocence while a disjointed spiral in Untitled (1970) evokes a contemplation on the cyclical, or perhaps inescapable, nature of life. Elsewhere a blood-red spider, isolated in a barren room embodies the anguish and sensitivity of motherhood in the chilling 1994 watercolor entitled Spider. The particular image of the spider remains the most iconic and consistent of Bourgeois’s symbols; its graceful yet predatory form first emerged through her drawings as early as 1947. She revisited the motif in the mid-1990s and subsequently developed it in a variety of media – most notably as monumental and haunting sculptures. While her large scale sculptures are fraught with grandeur, here in Spider, the creature is depicted on an intimate scale, her long legs elevating her within an imagined interior and looming large within the Bourgeois’s constructed framework.
The medium of drawing has always been integral to the artist's work. Beginning from a young age, Bourgeois would work in her parents’ tapestry restoration business, filling in and drawing the missing elements and patterns on tapestries waiting to be restored. For Bourgeois this formed the beginning of her artistic calling — a career that began in the late 1930s and spanned seventy years. The preternatural language of her visual symbolism found its origins here too; the turbulence between her mother and father, including the traumatic discovery of her father’s affair and her mother's chronic illness and premature death, would go on to profoundly affect her life’s work. Her spider motif, for instance, represents her mother as the weaver and the protector. Drawing from past experiences is an essential aspect of the artist’s modus operandi. In her own words, “I need my memories. They are my documents. I keep watch over them… You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you. If you are going to them, you are wasting t.mes . Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for sculpture” (Louise Bourgeois cited in Exh. Cat., Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory: Works 1982-1993, Part 3, 1994, p. 23).
Driven by a ceaseless, innate compulsion to create works of art rooted in buried familial trauma and childhood memories, Bourgeois's production negotiates and incessantly recapitulates her psychical experiences of loss, severance, and mourning across a pioneering and plural artistic terrain of sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and textile works. The present vignettes capture the potent lyricism and psychological complexity of her oeuvre over the course of several decades. Unlike any artist before or since, Bourgeois' poetic and often-painful response to her own psychobiography takes on a powerfully universal aesthetic agenda: sexual-political power dynamics, gendered embodiment, and identity are enmeshed and woven into the fabric of her work. Together, this group of works on paper executed over the course of nearly half a century of artistic production provide a profound and intimate glimpse into the artist's extraordinary career.
