"Why a spider?" The question, as if a stone egg had fallen heavily from a height of more than nine meters, was a black rain of images of malevolence, vulnerability and aggression triggered by the spider as the observer hovered between its long legs and as its webbed belly sac containing 17 white-gray marble eggs hung directly above her head. The person who created all this is Louise Bourgeois. More than twenty years later, she has become one with the big spider (Maman, 1999), a mysterious spider figure that she has compared to the secretions that make up a spider's web, dating back to a small painting she made in 1947. Back in 1995, Les Éditions du Solstice, Paris, published a set of Bourgeois's prints entitled Ode à ma mere (Ode to My Mother), the year Bourgeois first compared the spider in words to a mother figure: "For my best friend is my mother, who is thoughtful, wise, patient, soothing, accommodating, graceful, wonderful, indispensable, neat, like a helpful spider."

In her early years, Bourgeois focused on painting and printmaking, only turning to sculpture in the late 1940s. She once said that there was no competition between the mediums she worked in because "they were saying the same thing in different ways." Her first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982, and she has since grown in confidence, creating giant spiders, grotesque room-sized "cells" and a series of fabric sculptures made from old clothes, while at the same time returning to painting. It became clear that there was more than one way to get to know Bourgeois without the spiders, and that painting was the magic key.

In late spring 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Louise Bourgeois: Paintings, a retrospective on Bourgeois. The exhibition focused on her paintings made between 1938 and the late 1940s. Before turning to sculpture, she used painting to document her sense of displacement after moving to the United States on the eve of World War II and to suggest a certain scale, temperament, and sense of direction for future works, and her famous index of symbols emerges, including cages, bodies, and spiders and eggs in a disordered state of germination, which jump onto her psychic stage, pushing undercurrents into hearts from all directions. The art is a slit into her mind.

Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris to middle-class parents who ran a tapestry restoration company. As a teenager, she showed a talent for improvising to paint missing parts of antique tapestries. As a young girl, she would help clean tapestries by twisting and turning them in water and tying them into circles, and the spiral shapes that would later recur in her work came from twisted woven tapestries in rivers. She has said that her character was shaped by the conflicting emotions of her early family life. In many of her early paintings, the scars of her childhood became the driving force behind her work, and the pain of her father's 10-year affair with his governess, compounded by the context of World War I, led to a fear of abandonment, to the point where she dreamed of twisting her father's lover's neck into a ring. The spiral here seems to represent an attempt to control chaos, but at the same time the spiral also suggests hidden danger, as if a violence that could break the neck. Years later, this sentiment emerged in Spiral Woman (1984), in which a character trapped in a spiral hangs in mid-air, as if spinning in her own vulnerability. In Infinity (A l'infini, 20089), the spiral reappears, with spiral lines flowing freely around the fallen woman's body, the detached limbs, and the scene of childbirth, the etched lines evoking the double helix structure of two DNA strands, and the "infinity "The abstract visual language understands life as a journey, where birth, love, sex and death are also the cycles of human destiny.

In 1938, Bourgeois and her new husband Robert Goldwater left Paris for New York. Her early paintings, such as Runaway Girl (1938), depict her walking away from home on the turquoise water, carrying a small suitcase toward the sharp-toothed rocky shoreline. Bourgeois continued the same theme in 1994's Home for Runaway Girls, in which her assistant Jerry Gorovoy likened the Bourgeois of this period to Dorothy Gale, the young runaway from Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, and similarly Bourgeois also embarked on a journey to alleviate his own suffering.

The "body fragment" is often found in Bourgeois's visual vocabulary. She uses them to investigate the emotional complexity of the autobiographical body, a unique visual image often described as a "part-object. The term "part-object" was first coined by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on the psychology of early childhood development. According to Klein, the first part-object we encounter in life is the mother's breast, and because infants cannot integrate sensory information until they are two years old, their world consists of fragments. The infant's world is therefore composed of fragments, and the object is fragmented for the infant. Since then, the concept and form of the "partial object" has often been used by modern and contemporary artists to explore themes of sexuality, desire, or gender, and in the 1940s, in Fallen Woman/Femme Maison (1946-7), Bourgeois depicted a woman with a partial body mixed with a house. The female figure is a mixture of parts of the body and the house. In this work, she explores female identity and in doing so questions the traditional role of women at the time. This group of paintings was later often borrowed by feminist art movements, such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's 1972 installation Woman House, which was inspired by it.

Bourgeois has kept a diary since she was a child. In 1947, Bourgeois created a series of prints entitled He Disappeared into Complete Silence. She playfully combined poetic texts with prints. As critic Robert Storr put it, there is an "unpleasant bluntness" to the work.

In her old age, Bourgeois never lost this stinging expression. She began working on the Cells series in 1989. She once described her view: "Each cell deals with a fear, each cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at." Bourgeois creates huge emotional spaces, the interior of which the voyeur sees as bloody, invariably triggering visual imagery about pain. "Emotion is the devil." So she says.

Her whole life, like a martyr, dives wholeheartedly into the depths of pain. Thinking of this, I can't help but look at the spider again, and at this moment she is slowly opening her motherly and vast embrace. I can see little Bourgeois sitting with her mother in the sunlight, mending a corner of the tapestry. Perhaps this is her last dream.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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