Horizon Line

When Louise Bourgeois was a young girl in France in the 1920s, her parents bickered. To distract herself at dinner she used to mould the soft, white bread on the table into small figures. Often these resembled her father – whom she grew to hate for his affair with her au pair – and so she would violently amputate and devour the doughy corpses.  

Bourgeois called this act her “first sculptural solution”. It lays bare the intensely personal subject of her art, and how from the very beginning she saw her work as intrinsically connected with the stuff and feelings of quotidian, domestic life. Her art made material the psychic, inner realm that was at once tangible but ungraspable. Every work Bourgeois made has its roots in lived female experience and more often than not was concerned with her parents, her children, her body and the idea of home. 

This is particularly true of the many sculptures, installations and textile works on view at the Hayward’s recently opened exhibition. The Woven Child, on until 15 May, is the first major retrospective to focus on her work using textiles, which is a reference to her childhood, given that Bourgeois grew up surrounded by spools of thread, since her parents were in the business of restoring medieval tapestries. 

Beyond thread and fabric, what connects these works is that they were all made in the last twenty years of her life: the first in 1990 and the last in 2010, the year she died. Creating such an inventive array of works that can fill the Hayward well into your 90s is remarkable and surely counts one the most impressive final chapters of any artist. What is even more striking is how physically assertive these late works are. The awesome scale of Spider, 1997, (image 1) and the unflinchingly erotic, [yet] abject, nature of High Heels, 1998 (image 2) foreground the fiercely creative woman Bourgeois remained until the end. 

Despite the direct and unambiguous register of Bourgeois’ entire oeuvre – we never doubt that Femme Maison, 2001, a sculpture of a reclining woman with a house stitched onto her belly, is about anything other than the burdens of womanhood – there is a tender quality that complements the frightening impact of her work. 

This is perhaps most clear in Spider, 1997, undoubtedly the focal point of the exhibition. Although initially a terrifying, nightmarish vision, the spider softens as we approach. This is partly due to the fact it’s improbably balanced on such slender, awkwardly-bent, spike legs but also that as we look up into her we see a carefully protected sack of glass eggs. Bourgeois’ equation of mothers and spiders was both universal and deeply personal: many of the large-scale spider works are called Maman and this makes sense given her mother’s occupation as a textile restorer. She commented that, “I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” This melting of fear into comfort and hard into soft is further evident in the many works containing sewing needles – she often discussed “the magic power of the needle … to repair the damage” and offer “a claim to forgiveness”. 

Dealing with such universal, subliminal themes frees the work from historical references. Of course, we can’t help but see two generations of world war veterans in the many prosthetics, but on the whole Bourgeois’ works exist in an atemporal zone. The whole exhibition feels like we’re wandering through rooms of wombs and looms, lost to time. 

But the exhibition is also timely, indeed disconcertingly relevant, in its literal dissection of women’s bodies: these works transform into sculpture the societal and biological struggles faced by women today. In an age which often fetishises a 2D Instagram silhouette of womanhood, Bourgeois suggests women’s corporeal reality through needle and thread, creating swollen breasts and unsettling, strung-up body parts. One work, Tempter Tantrum, 2000, (image 3) transforms a doll-like woman’s body into a patchwork of overlapping pink flesh, each piece eerily similar to the surgical diagrams used to represent fashionable cosmetic surgeries such as Brazilian butt-lifts (globally, the fastest-growing beauty procedure, which has resulted in hundreds of deaths; such is the pressure to look a certain way). 

In turn, it’s easy to find echoes of Bourgeois’ influence on popular culture – the aliens in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, for example, are an obvious rehash of her Spiders (image above).  

Bourgeois doesn’t fit neatly into an art history timeline, despite having worked alongside many of the twentieth century’s avant-garde: one of her first tutors was Fernand Léger. As a young artist in Paris in the 1930s, Surrealism reigned supreme, but this didn’t appeal to Bourgeois, for whom women were the subject, not objects or muses. After marrying the art historian Robert Goldwater she moved to New York. She regularly exhibited alongside the Abstract Expressionists in the ’40s and ’50s, but again there was no real affinity. This uniqueness is undoubtedly part of her appeal: her works aren’t viewed through the lens of a particular movement but given the freedom to be seen however each viewer desires. 

Bourgeois’ huge legacy is also seen in the influence she wields on various generations of women artists for whom she showed it was possible to make deeply personal work not concerned with notions of “high art” but with the messiness of life and womanhood. It is easy to underestimate how much of a pioneer Bourgeois was: her 1982 MoMA solo-retrospective was the first such exhibition ever given to a woman artist. The women who most notably followed in her footsteps are Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow, Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke and more recently Tracey Emin, with whom Bourgeois collaborated right at the end of her life. Many of these artists are yet to receive meaningful recognition, such is the continuing plight of many unfairly overlooked women artists. 

Max Lunn is a journalist based in London