AGA exhibit
A National Gallery show explores Louise Bourgeois’s wide-ranging influence.
Curator Jonathan Shaughnessy gives a lecture on Louise Bourgeois Sunday at 1 p.m. at the AGA. Tickets are $ 15.
When French-American artist Louise Bourgeois created the iconic Personage sculptures in the late 1940s, she imagined them installed directly into the floor.
It never happened during Bourgeois’s long life. The skinny wooden totems were always mounted on metal bases at shows, easier and less destructive than drilling holes into a gallery’s hardwood.
Now, at the Art Gallery of Alberta, 10 Personages can be seen displayed as Bourgeois intended, in Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010, a show organized by the National Gallery of Canada. It opens Saturday.
The National Gallery learned about Bourgeois’s original vision when speaking with Jerry Gorovoy, the artist’s longtime assistant. They decided to make it so in a memorial exhibition for the artist, who died two years ago. She was 98.
“These works speak in a whole different way than they’ve ever done before in exhibitions,” curator Jonathan Shaughnessy says.
The show, on display for a year in Ottawa before travelling here, draws from the National Gallery’s significant holdings of Bourgeois artwork. The extraordinary sculptor had a major impact on many of the 20th-century’s major art and culture movements, including surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism and feminism.
“Her influence transcends any particular movement,” Shaughnessy says. “She is someone who’s part and yet apart from all the major movements.”
The AGA show is small in volume but not in impact. Shaughnessy describes it as a synthesis of Bourgeois’s mindblowing career, which dates back to the 1930s in France, her native country. At its centre is the 2008 installation Cell (Final Climb), a National Gallery acquisition that includes the original staircase from Bourgeois’s studio in New York City.
“She’d walk up and down that staircase every day,” Shaughnessy says. “Her whole life is in there. When she made the last climb, she had the spiral staircase removed.”
The staircase, encased in a rust-coloured ovular cage, stands more than four metres high. Inside, large wooden spheres, symbolic of her parents, are grounded on the floor below blue blown-glass orbs, which seem to float upwards. Threads connect to a central teardrop, symbolic of the artist and her connections with relationships and the past. So large and impacting is the installation, it verges on architecture; installation staff say the pieces barely fit into the building.
Though it is not the only ‘cell’ Bourgeois created, Shaughnessy worked hard to get this particular installation. “I really really wanted the gallery to have it. It’s an homage to her life lived.”
There are no spiders and nothing phallic in this exhibition. It’s disappointing news to those who know these are pervasive themes in Bourgeois’s work. The giant bronze arachnids she created toward the end of her life as an ode to her mother have become iconic, earning her the nickname “Spiderwoman.” Casts of the nine-metre spider Maman have been permanently installed in cities around the world, including Ottawa.
Bringing spiders to Edmonton was never discussed.
“There’s a tight premise for this show. It works well in terms of the Cell,” Shaughnessy says. “You’ve got a big installation, which speaks to everything, and from there you go to the first, and the last.”
Representing ‘first’ are the Personages, slight of build and deliberately scattered through one space at the AGA, giving the feel of people (or their ghosts) milling about at a cocktail party. These date back to between 1947 and 1950, early in Bourgeois’s career.
“She created them as memories of people but they’re also inspired by the skyline of New York,” Shaughnessy says. Bourgeois immigrated to the United States from France in the late 1930s with her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater.
Representing ‘last’ are the Echo sculptures, bronze, organic forms made from discarded clothing that reflect on the Personages.