Art Is A Guarantee Of Sanity

 Art Is A Guarantee Of Sanity
 (My Homework For Art College. K.Shiuka) 
Louise Bourgeois 
   (1911-2010)
(Louise Bourgeois, by Robert Mapplethorpe)

Time spent, time gone through,
time shared, time experienced,
time regretted, time forgotten,
time stopped, time remembered,
time recreated…
      Louise Bourgeois


 
(The birth, 2007. Gouache on paper. The Birth" was painted in 2007, when Bourgeois was 96-years-old! )


French born New Yorker  Luise Bourgeois’s paintings is based on memory,  particularly that of her early years in France.  she built her extraordinary career on pieces which explored women's deepest feelings on birth, sexuality and death. 
Her brilliant work was shaped by a traumatic childhood but she was able to hold onto the magic and wonder of childhood through out her life... 

 She was the greatest extraordinary artist in the 20th century. her paintings from Individual kind of experience are touching... She was probably best known for her series of giant spiders, at London's Tate Modern...

(A spider sculpture by L. Bourgeois. Tate Modern, London, 2007)

The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.

Working in a wide variety of materials, Bourgeois tackled themes relating to male and female bodies and emotions of anger, betrayal, even murder.. 
 Her work reflected influences of surrealism, primitivism and the early modernist sculptors such as Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi.

Bourgeois discovered herself in Art when she was a little girl, She said; " 'At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture''  despite this In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, after when 
her mother died in 1932,  mother's death inspired her to abandon mathematics and to begin studying art... Where/when she discovered her creative impulse in her childhood traumas and tensions.. And That is if why she was often angry and aggressive in her Artworks..And That is if why many people don't like Louise Bourgeois Art, but despite society's opinion, bourgeois said that; Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation – and I like it.'... 
(L. B; Triptych for the Red Room.. 1994)

 Bourgeois remarkable art; sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings and graphics. you can see the arc of stylistic development form the early Surrealist to the biomorphic, assemblage and the installations with sexually charged images that makes Bourgeois an essential Feminist artist. In 1984 with 'The Washington Post' Bourgeois said; 'I really want to worry people, to bother people, they say they are bothered by the double genitalia in my new work. Well, I have been bothered by it my whole life. I once said to my children, "It's only physiological, you know, the sex drive', that was a lie. It's much more than that.'. Art critic Robert Hughes said; " Bourgeois is the mother of American feminist identity art." ...Hughes noted  the key difference in her use of sexual imagery: She explores "femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar male conventions of looking at it from the outside, from the eyeline of another gender. ... Surrealist fascination with the female body becomes, so to speak, turned inside out." ...



  
In 1939 Bourgeois met her husband Robert Goldwater,  at Bourgeois' print store. Goldwater/ Bourgeois got married and they migrated to New York City.    In NY Goldwater resumed his career as professor of the arts at New York University Institute of Fine Arts,  while Bourgeois attended the Art Students League of New York. 
  In  n 1954, Bourgeois joined the American Abstract Artists Group, with several contemporaries, among them Barnett Newman , Ad Reinhardt., Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock 

Bourgeois received her first retrospective in 1982, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. During the 1970s, Bourgeois was a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective founded by fellow artist Anita Steckel that defended the use of sexual imagery in artwork.

In 2010, in the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. She created the piece I Do, depicting two flowers growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization Freedom to Marry. Bourgeois has said "Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing." 

 (Self-portrait, 1990-1994)
Her husband, Robert Goldwater, died in 1973. She was survived by two sons, Alain Bourgeois and Jean-Louis Bourgeois..

Louise Bourgeois, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century died age 98, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.
 (L. B - 'Helping Hands')

 Amputee with Crutch 1998

* Blue Dress
* Amputee with Peg Leg  
* Amputee with Crutch
* Tree with Woman 
* Tree with red crutch'.

(0. Blue Dress )

1. Blue Dress, the tunic has become 
a sky blue dress and bones replace the amputated limbs....

 (1. Amputee with Peg Leg )

1. Amputee with Peg Leg; The body’s left leg is covered by a trouser leg ending in a shoe. The right leg ends in a pink stump, amputated at the knee. A similar pink stump is depicted inside the sleeve of the figure’s left arm......  
 Amputee with Peg Leg  and  Amputee with Crutch portray a similar figure...

(2. Amputee with Cruth)  

(3. Tree with Red Crutch) 

.In this image 'Tree with Crutch she has referred to a plant or a tree as ‘a symbol of a person ... It has a right to exist, to grow and to procreate’ ... 


4.     The 'Tree with Woman’s body.Figures with amputated limbs, present in her sculptures since the early 1990s, stem from early memories of war veterans at the Louvre Museum in Paris, where she worked as a guide to the Exposition Universelle in 1937.  Also Bourgeois’ sister Henriette suffered from a condition which stiffened her leg, forcing her to walk with a cane. 

(4. Tree with Woman )

Louise Bourgeois in old sculptures and in paintings often used very noisy and aggressive colours, but in Amputee 1998  Bourgeois used very gentleness colours as a white, blue, pink which colours are very feminine colours.. 
Colours are important emotional registers for Bourgeois. She has stated: ‘Blue represents peace, meditation and escape. Red is an affirmation at any cost – regardless of the dangers in fighting – of contraction, of aggression. It’s symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved ... Pink is feminine. It represents a liking and acceptance of the self.’  Bourgeois’ spare use of colour in Topiary has dramatic effect in contrast to the predominant pale grey and black of the portfolio. Significantly, the brightest colour is the red of the crutch in the final image. Topiary, the art of clipping and training of plants into ornamental forms, represents an intervention on natural growth. Bourgeois’ title referring to ‘improvement’ employs her characteristic sarcastic humour to subvert a subject traditional to female identity, the acculturation of ‘woman as nature’. Often represented historically as horizontal landscape and allied with the earth, in Topiary, woman is portrayed as vertical – rooted in the earth but reaching up into the sky. The amputation imagery indicates that the ‘improvement’ may involve more dramatic mutilation than mere snipping and shaping. Bourgeois has emphasised that making art is her means of psychic survival....
I think finally she tried 'transform hating into love', and Bourgeois very successful transform hating into love, and she will be always modern, because love always will be very modern in this world.
I think Louise Bourgeois, 'Amputee' 1998 is  great philosophical and spiritual message for people.. This several artworks means, everything is alive in the universe, including trees.. everybody can feel pain and love, that;  this world no less no more is one whole soulful spiritual world...And if we want realises it make ART, because 'Art is a guarantee of sanity.'... 

              Khatia Shiuka
                     UK - 2013
    Louise Bourgeois & Andy Warhol)

  

P.s I like it, It's very close with dadaism :))))

Khatia Shiuka & New Yorker poet Billy Lamont In Tate Gallery

(Louise Bourgeois's Exhibition)