Secret Of Her Success

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday July 16, 1996

Reviewed by JOHN McDONALD

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

By Marie-Laure Bernadac

Flammarion (distributed by Thames & Hudson), hardcover, 191pp, $67.50

ISBN 2 08013 600 3

TO OCCUPY a place in the history of modern sculpture "between Brancusi and Giacometti" sounds tremendously impressive. Yet, since one must be wary about words written on the dust-jackets of books, it helps to remember that "between" is not the same as "alongside". It is probably misleading to compare Louise Bourgeois (b.1911) with Brancusi and Giacometti, not just because she hails from a generation later and has been able to assimilate their lessons, but because it tends to diminish her own originality.

Bourgeois's late-blooming career has been one of the talking points of art in the 1990s. After being ignored for most of her working life, in her 80s she has become the artist every international museum wants to exhibit and collect. In recent years she has featured in all the main exhibitions in Europe and America, with a survey of her work being shown this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

The older she gets, the larger and more ambitious her projects become, with a late series of highly theatrical installations attracting the esteem of the critics. A large part of the attraction has come from Bourgeois's spirited, outspoken interviews. In art and conversation, her obsessive theme is her own childhood, with the sexual symbolism, the psychological and corporeal violence of her work springing from her constant reflections on these formative years.

Born into a middle-class family of tapestry restorers, Louise was the second of three children. Her father, a manipulative and selfish man, openly conducted an affair with the children's English governess, Sadie, which was tolerated by his wife. This long-running me'nage a` trois had the most profound effect on Louise, who has never ceased analysing the arrangement in excruciating detail. All her artistic reflections on love and sex, the body, feminine identity and the cannibalism of human relationships can be traced back to that eccentric family group.

The strength of her art resides in a mixture of instinct and intellectuality.

Although she is headstrong, passionate, and irreverent by nature, Bourgeois has been fascinated by mathematics, medicine and psychoanalysis. Neither should one discount her marriage to Robert Goldwater, a specialist in tribal and modern art, who must have influenced her totemic sculptures of the 1940s. With these credentials, taken together with contemporary art's infatuation with "the body", Bourgeois has become an irresistible subject for today's art essayists.

This monograph by Marie-Laure Bernadac, the head curator of the Cabinet des Arts Graphiques, at the Centre Pompidou, is a rather perfunctory introduction to the main themes of Bourgeois's work. The story of the artist's childhood is dutifully retold and her current high status acknowledged, but the bulk of the text is devoted to a mechanistic explanation of the meaning of individual pieces. This might be useful for art students writing essays, but as a narrative it tends to flatten out Bourgeois's oeuvre into a series of neatly plotted points on a graph, taking a steep rise at the end. Some of the dullness of the writing is probably due to the translation. When one reads that Bourgeois is "now one of the leading lights in contemporary art", one wonders if Bernadac could have found an equally ponderous cliche in French. ("Une etoile du monde de l'art?")

There is also some fashionable jargon, as when Bourgeois's works are described as "desiring machines", a term added to the academic lexicon by those two multi-purpose intellectuals, Deleuze and Guattari.

I can't believe this fuzzy concept has yet reached the public domain, even in France.

Bernadac is an admirer of this art, who sees her role as an explicator, not a critic. Yet, by the end of the book, Bourgeois's constant turning back to childhood memories and her need to dramatise the events of her own life seem claustrophobic. Narcissism is the driving force behind her inventions and it is hard to empathise with her point of view, which remains that of the precocious child starved of love and attention. Works that have a cathartic dimension for the artist may attract us merely as voyeurs. Where Bourgeois uses gruesome forms or sexual imagery to fulfil some inner need, the viewer may find the experience akin to a visit to Madame Tussaud's . As a sculptor, Bourgeois is interested in striking images, not formal harmonies, but many of her works remain "idea" pieces that do not encourage lengthy examination.

This book is a thorough introduction to Louise Bourgeois and her work, but it never delves too deeply into a genuinely complex subject. To do justice to the artist's childhood and its lifelong reverberations, it would take the skills of a novelist rather than a curator. One can only imagine what Proust would have done with such material!