Creation Begins with Restoration The magnificent work of Louise Bourgeois

If you visit Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, you will see the huge sculpture. At first glance, it looks like a spaceship or an alien, but when you look up between its long barbed legs, you see that it is a female spider holding eggs. The pure white eggs, protected by the abdomen and thorax, seem to symbolize the spider’s maternal nature.
The creator of this work, “Maman,” which is as large as 10 meters, is Louise Bourgeois, a French-born artist who came to the United States to work. Who is this Louise Bourgeois, and how does he create this grotesque but compassionate and deeply memorable work?

Loving Mother and Hating Father

Let’s follow her background at first. Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and grew up in a house that later served as a tapestry restoration workshop in the Paris suburb of Antony, which the Bourgeois family purchased. The property was bordered by The Bièvre River, the subject of her later book, “Ode a la Bièvre”.
The tapestries, often frayed at the feet of the woven figures and animals when they were moved. Bourgeois used to sketch embroiderers to repair such damage.
　
At the time of Bourgeois’ birth, her father wanted a boy and was cold toward Bourgeois, who was born as a woman. The father also allowed a nanny/teacher, who was only seven years older than Bourgeois, to live in the house as his mistress, and the mother, whom Bourgeois loved, accepted the distorted relationship. Her mother died suddenly when Bourgeois was 20 years old, and Bourgeois was driven to the point of attempting suicide, giving up mathematics, which she had studied until then, and turning to art.
　
Bourgeois then married art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City, where she raised her children and worked as a creative artist and art school teacher. After a gap and period of lack of recognition following the death of her father, Bourgeois came to widespread attention in 1982 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the first major retrospective of female sculptors, at the time she was 71 years old. Her creative energy did not wane, and she continued to work in her studio, a former sewing factory, and was in her 80s when she unveiled “Maman”.

various creations of Bourgeois

Her creations were diverse, including paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations. Today, it is quite common for artists to work with a wide variety of materials and techniques, but in her time, most artists continued to work in a single field, such as painters working in painting and sculptors working in sculpture. she, on the other hand, could create works that gave different impressions depending on the method of expression, such as fabric or metal, even if the shapes were similar, and could choose the most appropriate technique to suit the theme.
　

She was also an excellent writer: after her father passed away in 1951, she went to see her doctor, reading books on psychoanalysis, and kept a record of the treatments she received. Even today, she has left behind a bundle of papers that spell out her treatments, dreams, and notes with fragments of memories. The act of verbalizing and preserving her feelings and memories is strongly connected to her creations, and her sharp, painful, and sometimes black humor-tinged words help viewers to understand her works.
　
Despite the variety of materials and methods of expression, Bourgeois’s theme when creating her works was her own life, and her creations were intended to heal the wounds of her girlhood. From the writings she left behind, we can see that she was aware of the unreasonableness of her environment, and that her pain and obsession were the source of her creativity and the brightness of her works.

Going back to the Tapestry Restoration Factory

Bourgeois, who had a free use of materials, made extensive use of textiles and fabrics in her creations, which can be attributed to her family’s history as a tapestry restoration factory.
Here are some myths and legends about fabrics. In Greek mythology, Theseus escapes from the labyrinth with a ball of thread given to him by his lover Ariadne. In the same myth, Penelope weaves and unweaves the coffin robe of her husband Laertes to bury him and fend off suitors. In Christian stories, cloth is often an important motif, most notably in the well-known episode in which Christ wiped the sweat from his face with the veil offered to Veronica, and the image of his face was transferred onto the fabric.
　
The needle can be seen as a tool to attack the enemy while mending something. The thread functions as a way through the labyrinth that is life, and as something to unravel. A cloth made with a needle and thread can be thought of as marking the boundary between life and death.

Bourgeois’ vast and magnificent body of work can be seen in the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you it was wonderful. ” at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo from September 25, 2024 (Wed) to January 19, 2025 (Sun).
　
Photographs without names were taken by the writer Akiko Nakano at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.