Untitled

Louise Bourgeois, who passed away last year at the age of 98, is widely recognized as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois studied fine arts at the École du Louvre and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and gained important firsthand experience in the ateliers of established French
artists including André Lhote and Fernand Léger. In 1938, Bourgeois married the American art historian Robert Goldwater (1907-1973), and relocated to New York.

Bourgeois' move coincided with a vibrant time in the New York art world as Abstract Expressionism helped vault the city to the helm of the international avant-garde. Yet it was a male-dominated environment and Bourgeois' first major breakthrough came in the 1960s, when a younger generation of feminist curators and scholars, along with artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman, began to notice her work. Another breakthrough came in 1982 with her retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Then almost seventy-one years old, Bourgeois became cherished as a feminist icon, although she only reluctantly embraced the label herself. At this event, her highly original work earned mainstream reputation for the tremendous impact it had quietly exercised on contemporary art for decades.

Although many of Bourgeois' works are abstract in nature, they are suggestive of the human figure and touch upon emotions such as loneliness, betrayal, anxiety, and fear. Her practice involved a continuous dialogue between the male and the female, often presenting hybrid body shapes across various media, including drawings and
sculptures in latex, plaster, marble, and bronze. Many of her works likewise evoke both exterior and interior body spaces, frequently centering on sexual parts.

Untitled (2005) presents a multi-dimensional, almost explosive shape, abstract except for a single human arm emerging from its core. Similarly sized to the multiple spikes, the arm stands out for its rounded, organic appearance amidst the otherwise sharp edges. It seems at once to present a claustrophobic metaphor for being trapped, whether mentally or physically, and to present a figure undergoing metamorphoses. The many parts also present a visual parallel to a spider, a recurring motif within the artist's work.

In a review of the artist's 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, art historian Robert Storr offers these reflections on the importance of the ideas of metamorphoses and transformation within Bourgeois' oeuvre: "What is most important about [her autobiographical narrative] is not its richness in detail, but the archetypal roles played by its cast and the almost infinite variety of emotional nuance it evokes in both teller and listener. We are thus confronted with the persuasive reality that echoes the dialectics of both modern psychology and classical myth, in which gods and demiurges act out their desires with the paradoxical combination of fickleness, cruelty, and powerful constancy we accept as inevitableJust as the gods vacillate between disruptive whimsy and destructive anger, changing themselves or men without warning to beasts or trees or stone, each quality or image of Bourgeois' world is subject to unexpected transformation into its opposite or into a composite of supposed opposites."1

1 Robert Storr, "Louise Bourgeois: Gender and Possession," Art in America (April 1983).