Goodbye Louise Bourgeois

The artist Louise Bourgeois passed away yesterday at the age of 98. I was fortunate to see some of her work last year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. At one point in her career, she made a series of gigantic spider mama's with long spindly legs and a big sack of babies hanging from the fulcrum where the legs gathered into a head. In other pieces, she created "rooms" from tall pieces of wood hinged together door like with tiny windows to peer into. There she lay objects evocative of female spaces, lace, white gloves, marbled hands, a sewing basket, and then the smear of blood on a wall, a heart, a syringe. In her art, she sought to find the trembling safety of unsafe places, emotions, situations.

There were many many years when she was ignored by the "Art" world, because women weren't taken seriously as anything, let alone artists. But, she pressed on with beautiful sculptures in marble and bronze. "Arch of Hysteria," shows a body flung into a wildly arching back bend, the head severed from the neck (see the NYT obit for this).

Her work evokes in me feelings of wonder, vulnerability, strength, surrender. And a strong desire to embrace things ignored, forgotten, left behind; the beating heart, the spider's egg case, my father's voice.