Broad Strokes, page 12
Famously, Pollock did neither.
The final year of his life, Pollock painted not at all, though Krasner tried to keep him working and sober. She got a reputation for bitchiness, which may have been deserved. But then, she had some things to feel bitchy about.
Her own work was not one of them. By the time Pollock died in an alcohol-fueled car crash (one young woman died with him; his mistress lived) in the summer of 1956, Krasner had completed a series of impressive collages made by tearing up old paintings she found insufficient and reassembling the shards on canvas. As in Milkweed here, the results revealed a beautiful balancing point somewhere between Matisse and Motherwell, embracing the past and present, hers and the whole history of Modern art. Krasner had found her own way, working from without and within. Her work had never been better.
Krasner named the collage paintings after they were made, coming up with titles by association. So Milkweed isn’t a “picture” of the plant per se, but a feeling or spirit or color or shape linked with it, at least in her mind. As to what Milkweed or any other Krasner artwork means, she said, “I think my painting is autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”
It strikes me that the collages are Krasner’s most obviously autobiographical work. What is autobiography if not selecting chunks of the past and artfully reorienting them in the present? Krasner of course meant more than this mechanical act. She meant that her work as a whole, which continued long past the Little Image series and collages and well into the next three decades, expanding in size, color, and motion, was ripe with her joys and sorrows. Krasner was a restless, protean painter, changing and growing until the end. She did not have children; she did not remarry. She painted. Art itself was her whole life.
Sixteen years after Krasner’s death, Marcia Gay Harden won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for depicting her in the biopic Pollock (2000). I’d known about the movie for years, even before it was made. Susan Emshwiller, daughter of my wonderful first writing mentor, Carol Emshwiller, wrote the screenplay. It’s a great film. But the irony of Best Supporting Actress is too much. If you want to know Krasner, look to her art.
CHAPTER 11:
LOUISE BOURGEOIS
In my art I am the murderer.
—LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Art is a guaranty of sanity.
—LOUISE BOURGEOIS
SOMETIMES YOU DO JUDGE a book by its cover. We’ve all experienced the siren song of a compelling picture stirring some covetous need (The Goldfinch, anyone?). Back in the days before Amazon or Google, you could know almost nothing about a book (or album!), and still want it simply because of a captivating image.
That’s how on a late afternoon on the Lower East Side in the early ’90s I happened to leave Saint Mark’s Bookshop with a copy of Lucy Lippard’s From the Center zipped inside my leather jacket. I wasn’t stealing; it was raining. I was protecting the cover, the reason I’d needed to own that book.
This was the first time I encountered a Femme Maison, part of a series of drawings and paintings done in the late 1940s by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, wherein the heads of nude female figures are covered by—or have perhaps transmogrified into—houses. I’ve seen many examples since, but the Lippard cover is still my favorite.
In stark black and white, it depicts a nude with curving thighs and hips, but with everything from her navel up contained in a boxy rectilinear house (though two U-shapes that imply breasts show through the first floor). It’s a heavy load. This is no suburban-picket-fence-type house, this is a frickin’ château, with a big central staircase and two stories of Roman arches like a mini coliseum. The figure’s left hand hangs loose at her side, while the other—or so I first thought—cheerfully waves. She seemed to be waving at me. Flagging me down? Later I thought the gesture might read differently, something like, Hey you! Can you get this house off me? The wall above her limp left hand is suspiciously coffin-shaped.
Louise Bourgeois. Femme Maison. 1984.
Version 2 of 2, only state, variant. 1984. Photogravure with Chine-collé, plate: 101/16 x 47/16 inches; sheet: 195/16 x 1415/16 inches. The Museum of Modern Art. © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY.
This was how I discovered Louise Bourgeois, a mother and an artist then around eighty years old, living just blocks west of where I’d first found her, and still furiously producing great work.
Femme Maison is literally “woman house,” but it really means “housewife.” Bourgeois was a housewife when she made them, and a pretty good one. Might we imagine that they are self-portraits of a kind? Bourgeois said that a Femme Maison “does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she is hiding.”
I hadn’t known anything about the artist then, but her Femme Maison contained everything I—a young woman starting out in life—feared (or secretly hoped for?) about womanhood. That a home would consume me, destroy a vital part of my personality and intelligence, i.e., my head. But also, Hey man, that is one big-ass house. Maybe I could have a house like that?
Ah, the conflicting desires of young womanhood.
I carried Lippard’s book safely through a light rain, to the apartment I shared with my friend and fellow grad student, Martha, who was smart as shit, with a low voice, dry laugh, and a wit to match. I was still close enough to high school to hope her brains and savoir faire might sluff off on me by proximity, though the chasm between us felt unbridgeable. I had dyed black hair straight out of the Ramones; Martha was ringed in God-given blonde curls like a Raphael angel. She was from academic-sounding Andover and her father worked at Harvard. I was from Montana and the California coast, my father a grocery store attorney. She was a Medievalist; I was a Modernist. But we were both interested in feminist art history (the subtitle of Lippard’s book was, in fact, Feminist Essays on Women and Art). I researched women artists, while Martha’s scholarship was far more searching. While I wrote about Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, she wrote about Christ’s wounds as vaginal images and the like. But we were both, if I may flatter myself, hell-raisers of our kind. She was my sister in art and crime.
I partly bought the Lippard book thinking we’d both read it. I can’t remember if I ever loaned it to Martha, and don’t know where it is now, cannot find it among my many bookshelves and boxes. The memory of it simply ends with its acquisition.
But Louise Bourgeois, she remembered everything. A handy trait in an artist, as her work amply reveals. Because that work—and it is a massive oeuvre spanning some seven decades, multiple media, and almost zero culling—relates in some way to her own biography, an overview of her life is practically a requirement.
Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911. “I was a pain in the ass when I was born,” she said, noting the unpleasant interruption in holiday Champagne and oyster service, not to mention the doctor’s extreme inconvenience. If her work—and words—are to be believed, that prick of perceived nuisance pierced her childhood. Especially where her father was concerned.
She’d been named after him (Louis Bourgeois), partly because he wanted a boy. Her father was not above sadistic teasing for what she lacked in that regard (Google Louise Bourgeois-peels tangerine for a gutting spectacle of how childhood pain can linger even into glorious old age). The accusation of penis envy by her father—involving said tangerine and a table knife—seems tailor-made for Surrealist purposes. It’s no wonder Bourgeois grew up to create haunting tableaux with titles like The Destruction of the Father.
She waited out World War I—her father was away fighting—with her mother’s family, who ran a business locating and repairing old tapestries, massive textiles with intricate weaving and complex scenes with elaborate borders and backgrounds. Repairing them was as much art as trade.
When Bourgeois’s father came home from the war, he scouted the countryside for tapestries (often repurposed to divide up barns or keep horses warm on cold nights) while her mother ran a workshop out of their home, overseeing a staff of twenty-five women. Her mother was both practical and artistic, capable of running a large workshop and of recreating beautiful artworks of the past. Though strong in many ways, her mother was not physically vital. She’d barely survived the Spanish flu during World War I (an epidemic that killed some forty-three thousand soldiers), and Bourgeois spent much of her childhood attending to her mother’s health.
Louise Bourgeois. Fillette. 1968.
Latex over plaster, 231/2 x 11 x 71/2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art. © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY.
She said she wanted to be indispensible, and she was in other ways as well. By age ten, Bourgeois was drawing in the missing parts of tapestries. Since they were huge and heavy, they’d often been dragged along, wearing away the bottoms. “I became an expert at drawing legs and feet,” Bourgeois said. “It taught me that art can be interesting, as well as useful. That is how my art started.” It was in the workshop’s sewing room, sitting with gossiping women intent on work but free to talk, that Bourgeois discovered her young English nanny was also her father’s mistress. The rage it inspired fueled her art for decades.
Her father considered contemporary artists “parasites,” but when Bourgeois’s mother died in 1932 (ah, these dead mothers!), she abruptly switched from studying math at the Sorbonne to studying art. For her, the two pursuits were not so far apart. “The sculpture is a problem to be solved,” Bourgeois said. “And it is a pleasure to find a solution.” She studied in excellent studios by exchanging translating skills for art instruction (it was Americans who could pay, so she at least had her hated English nanny to thank for that). Bourgeois knew many Surrealist artists, but refused the roles they proffered, which was as either model or mistress.
In 1938, she met an American art historian named Robert Goldwater while selling him a Picasso print in a small gallery she ran inside the family’s tapestry workshop in Paris. “In between conversations about Surrealism and the latest trends,” she said, “we got married.”
Marrying Goldwater got her out of Paris and into New York, which was fortunate, as World War II was on the horizon. Just as fortunate, it meant leaving behind the weight of European art history, along with social and familial constraints.
By 1941, Bourgeois was une vrai femme maison, a housewife with three young sons and a respected New York intellectual for a husband. She kept making art, though not everyone knew that professor Goldwater’s wife was also an artist. Surrealists who’d likewise escaped Europe sometimes gathered at their home. Bourgeois was unimpressed. “I objected to them,” she said. “They were so lordly and pontifical.” Shades of the father. Shades, certainly, of a male prerogative that she resisted, and sometimes skewered in her work.
While a 2-ft/61-cm latex penis might imply certain pornographic (and male wish-fulfillment?) properties, in Bourgeois’s conception, it’s mostly amusing. Bulbous, wrinkly, and oversize, it is, by implication, a little overblown. A take underscored by the work’s title, Fillette, which means “Little Girl.”
Not so mighty after all, Mr. Penis. It might be called “my little pet,” and that’s just how it’s portrayed in a famous photograph of Bourgeois taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. Bourgeois, grinning and pleased with herself, has Fillette tucked casually under one arm, her right hand cupped beneath the glans penis as if it were the muzzle of a small dog—a wiener dog?—tucked under the arm of her fur coat. She might be any lady who lunches in midtown, one who doesn’t go anywhere without her little pet. A different sort of lady. As if Leonardo’s Lady with Ermine were reincarnated in 1980s Manhattan, fondling a phallus instead of a weasel.
By the time she made Fillette in 1968, Bourgeois was showing her work after a long hiatus from active participation in the art world. She’d done the Femme Maison series in 1946–1947, then not long after had given up painting for good. From as far back as her studies in Paris, her instructor, the painter Fernand Léger, had told her, “You are not a painter. You are a sculptor.”
Her first sculptures were tall abstract standing pieces carved from lightweight balsa wood that she called her Personages. “You can have a family and work in wood,” she explained. “It’s not dirty. It’s not noisy. It’s a humble, practical medium.” The totemic Personages, bolted directly to the floor without bases, were almost like a small crowd of their own populating her first one-woman show of sculpture in 1949.
Her father died in 1951, which rattled Bourgeois to her core. Her violent reaction to his death somehow stopped her from showing for a decade, but she kept working.
Goldwater taught art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, where one of his students was Lucy Lippard. As a young critic, Lippard curated a groundbreaking show in 1966 called “Eccentric Abstraction.” Bourgeois hadn’t shown for some time, but Lippard heard about her former professor’s wife’s work and paid a call to her basement studio. What Lippard found astonished her. “Many artists destroy their work not because it is bad but because it is not successful—because other people are not interested in it,” Bourgeois said. Years of steady, inventive work filled every space of her studio.
Lippard featured Bourgeois in her “Eccentric Abstraction” show alongside artists decades her junior. The older artist was a hit.
Timing couldn’t have been better. Feminism was on the rise and Bourgeois was the perfect object lesson: a talented visionary who’d been unjustly overlooked. In 1973, her husband, Robert, died. “I was a runaway girl, and Robert saved me,” she told the New Yorker in 2002. In a long career of truth-telling, Bourgeois was always grateful for her husband. And yet, after his death she flourished, and so did her work.
Bourgeois died in 2010 at age ninety-eight, a celebrated artist working until the end.
Four years later, in 2014, Martha and I were together for the first time in a decade. Circling fifty, our hair now the same dirty blonde and shoulder length, we were both mothers of two teenaged children, an older boy and a younger girl each. Both married to the men we’d been dating twenty-five years before, the fathers of those children. We’d both known what it was to be a femme maison, like Bourgeois, managing children alongside careers in art. We’d ended up more alike than I could have imagined possible. Except that Martha had gotten her PhD and become a full professor, while I’d left the Institute to write.
We were back in New York, so revisiting the Institute of Fine Arts was essential. We peeked in on the old seminar room with its big round table, and the lecture hall next door, once the mansion’s former ballroom, lined by mirrors and gilt pilasters, lit by chandeliers. We crossed the Great Hall, with its curving staircase and multilevel tapestry that might have made me think of Louise Bourgeois, if I’d had her in mind.
We looked in the “Oak Room,” where wine and tea were served after Friday afternoon lectures, then wandered into the “Marble Room,” with its wall-to-wall golden-hued stone, where we ate and bitched and gossiped. How many hours did I sit in that room? More than in any lecture or seminar, that’s certain.
“Look,” Martha said. Pushed against one wall was a model of the building we were in, on a stand in an open cage, with movable oval mirrors above and to each side.
“I forgot about this,” I said, moving closer. I’d seen the press release when it was donated, but never thought of it again. Bourgeois had created and then given to the school a work called The Institute. It was as literal as could be imagined: a replica. Far from Bourgeois’s typically astonishing vision, it seemed out of place in her oeuvre.
Later I read a piece by feminist art historian and Institute grad Linda Nochlin, quoting Bourgeois: “The Institute played an important part in my life. For many years my husband Robert Goldwater taught there. The four o’clock Friday lectures and tea were events I enjoyed.” Oh, me too.
There was something Alice-in-Wonderland-like about being inside the Institute looking at an artwork called The Institute that was just that: the Institute. It was like I’d taken some of those Wonderland pills and things were swerving bigger, then smaller, then bigger. Time was zooming in and out, too.
Louise Bourgeois. The Institute. 2002.
Silver, 12 x 273/4 x 181/4 inches. Steel, glass, mirrors, and wood vitrine: 70 x 40 x 24 inches. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY.
There I was again with Martha in the Marble Room, as we’d been hundreds of times many years ago.
We touched the mirrors, turning them up and down, getting the bird’s-eye view of the roof and angles on the side walls, but never able to see inside. Cast in silver, The Institute’s windows coolly reflected back at us. There is always something unerringly true about Bourgeois’s choice of material. Silver is a chilly medium. And though The Institute can apparently be taken apart—each floor dismantled and peered into, like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle of rooms and levels—if you are just looking (the case for most any viewer), you cannot see in. The entire thing feels exclusive, hermetic to the point of being off-limits.
Louise Bourgeois. Maman. 1999.
Bronze, stainless steel, marble. 30.5 x 33 feet. © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY.
That’s a little how it felt when I was a student there, too. As if, again, by some looking-glass magic I had made it inside a place where I did not belong.
Or maybe I did.
Linda Nochlin said of her time as a young woman at the Institute, “It was difficult, but not always so—at times, the struggle itself was exhilarating and energizing. Bourgeois’s late work, among other things, reminds me of the contradictory aspects of a vanished past.”
