Arte always seems to manage to produce interesting DVD series.
Among the releases in the "Portraits d’Artistes" series there is also Camille Guichard’s film about artist Louise Bourgeois.
This release could be considered as a tribute to the artist who, born in France in 1911, died just a few days ago, on 31st May 2010, in New York.
Bourgeois was an unstoppable creative force: she worked for over fifty years, completing her last pieces the week
before she died.
Bourgeois first studied mathematics and
geometry at the Sorbonne, two subjects that, she claimed, gave her stability. Soon, though, she decided to move onto art, studying at the Ecole du
Louvre, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Académie Julian and Studio
Fernand Léger.
In the 30s after marrying American art historian Robert Goldwater, she moved to the United States where she continued
her studies at the Art Students League in New York.
Her first works were
based on engraving and painting techniques, but in the 40s she focused more on
sculpture, influenced after the Second World War by the European surrealist
artists.
In the 60s Bourgeois experimented a lot with different
materials such as bronze, rubber and stone and her works became larger. Yet she remained faithful to the themes she explored in her works.
The main inspirations
that led her to create very profound works that mixed sexuality and
innocence were her family, the relationship
with her parents - Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois who owned a
gallery that dealt in antique tapestries - and her father's infidelities and the traumas and resentments they caused her as a child (when she was eleven she discovered her English governess was also her father's mistress).
Well-known all over the world for her gigantic spider structures called "Maman" that won her the
nickname of "Spiderwoman", conceived as an ode to her mother's protective and nurturing power in a
frightening world (the spider also being a metaphor for her mother who worked as a weaver), Bourgeois didn’t only inspire the art world.
Her works were often featured in exhibition exploring the connections between art and fashion, influencing also designers and stylists.
In 1982, she became the first woman to be honoured with a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
In the 1990s the artist created quite a few works in which textiles played an important role.
In 1993 she presented at the Venice Biennale a project entitled "Cells", little furnished rooms with scattered body parts and fragments of cloth that were metaphors for her life.
In other cases the artist incorporated pieces of cloth - elements that somehow connected once again the artist with her family and their business - into figures or formations that had some human shape.
The female figure entitled "Temper Tantrum" was characterised by large breasts and buttocks that evoked themes of fertility and sexuality and, like the human figures
in "Seven in a Bed", was made out of stitched up cotton, a material used to symbolise warmth but also vulnerability as the patchwork-like surface evoked feeling of fear, violence and destruction.
Interested in the physicality of things, Bourgeois also produced between 2002 and 2008 a series of Fabric Drawings, currently exhibited during the "Fabric Works" event at the Fondazione Vedova in Venice
(the exhibition opened last week and will be open until 19th September, so, if you're planning a trip to Venice this summer, try to tie this exhibition in with the events of the Architecture Biennale).
Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Louise Bourgeois in a furry coat and carrying under her arm one of her sculptures of a phallus (that she used to call “fillettes”, little girls).
The image perfectly fits this powerfully inventive
and disquieting modern artist and icon of feminism, obsessed with the dark secrets of the body.
If you enjoy Camille Guichard's documentary, check out also Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, as that may provide further insights into Louise Bourgeois' work.
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