RESEARCH General Arts

ART
Louise Bourgeois show includes works not shown before publicly

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

5/1/02

"Quarantania" 1947-53 Bronze, dark patina 80 1/2 x 27 x 27 inches Collection of the artist, courtesy Cheim & Reid, New York

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- For much of her career, artist Louise Bourgeois lived and worked in New York City surrounded by some of the most celebrated American artists of the 20th century, among them, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. But her own induction into that elite club was slow in coming.

"For decades, the only people who looked seriously at her work were artists," said Josef Helfenstein, director of the Krannert Art Museum at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But she has received enormous attention in the last 15 years."

And more attention is coming her way now as the result of a new exhibition, "Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work," on view at Illinois' art museum through Aug. 4. The exhibition, curated by Helfenstein, features sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints created by Bourgeois in the 1940s and '50s, after she moved to New York from her native France with her husband, the art historian and critic Robert Goldwater. Helfenstein said the show, drawn largely from private collections -- including the artist's -- is the most comprehensive museum exhibition of Bourgeois’ early work organized in this country. Some of the works have never been shown publicly.

"The Blind Leading the Blind" 1947-49 Bronze, dark patina 69 1/4 x 69 x 23 inches Collection of the artist, courtesy Cheim & Reid, New York

Among the works on view at the Krannert Art Museum are 25 sculptures, which the artist refers to as Personages. First sculpted from wood she bought on the streets of New York, and later cast in bronze, the Personages are monolithic, people-sized pieces Bourgeois created while working in her rooftop studio. In an essay from the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, Helfenstein writes that the Personages "deal with a highly personal and complex range of physical and emotional conditions." Among them, he lists "growth and maternal symbols in conjunction with nature; aggression, hostility and opposition; distance and immobility; the utopia of escape; deception and helplessness."

"The Personages, the most distinct group of work in the early years, have only recently been recognized as an outstanding and highly complex contribution to the history of sculpture in the 20th century," Helfenstein wrote. "Although Bourgeois has developed her work in unprecedented directions after 1955 until this very moment, constantly shifting to new concepts, styles and materials, the Personages provide the key to the crucial themes and concerns of her entire body of work."

The 90-year-old artist frequently mines her own past, including her childhood in France, when searching for those themes, which are oft-repeated. "Her work is very personal," Helfenstein said, "but it’s not only autobiographical. Her work deals with emotion in ways male artists haven’t dealt with it ... it has an anthropological dimension. The Personages were not created and perceived exclusively as art; they were treated more like pets or children -- from the perspective of a woman, not the male artist’s perspective, where there is a clean division between art and life."

Following its opening at Illinois, the Bourgeois exhibition will travel to the Madison Art Center, Madison, Wis., Sept. 15-Nov. 17, and to the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colo., Dec. 13-Feb. 2, 2003.