Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Guggenheim Museum, New York

Through Sept. 28

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No artist captures the creepy connection between eroticism and violence better than Louise Bourgeois, said Peter Plagens in Newsweek. Now 96, she has been making art for half a century that’s “pioneering, quirky, technically breathtaking, disturbing, confessional, and very, very sexual.” An “essential” retrospective at the Guggenheim begins with works the French artist created shortly after immigrating to New York in the 1930s. But it was the deeply personal sculptures produced in the 1960s that made her a heroine of early feminist art. Bourgeois’ still-seething anger at her philandering father, for instance, is referenced in works such as In Choisy (1993)—which shows a guillotine poised above a marble model of her childhood home. “Here’s a work of modern art whose meaning isn’t hard to figure out.” One disturbing recent work, “tellingly titled Maman (‘Mommy’ in French),” is a 30-foot-high spider made from steel and marble. “The odd feeling of imprisonment you, get when you’re under the creature, with legs all around you,” is typical of several womb-like, claustrophobia-inducing spaces scattered throughout the exhibition.

Bourgeois’ relentlessly bleak themes can be off-putting, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. But her incessant experimentation with materials and styles ensures that this retrospective is full of pleasant surprises. “Over the show’s 60-year span, Ms. Bourgeois doesn’t get ‘better’ as much as she gets different.” She has created sculptures using everything from salvaged construction timber to delicate, stitched fabric to stone lifted into place by cranes. Self-consciously Freudian sculptures, such as the “latex-and-plaster penis that is also a vagina and floats like a mobile (Filette, 1968),” tell an intensely personal story of psychological trauma. But they also tell of a woman who thrived in the male-dominated art world and developed her own innovative aesthetic.