In March 2021, as I was trying to find my feet with my new newsletter while in the grip of a worldwide pandemic, I wrote this piece titled ‘Surrealist Isolation’. At the time, I was sharing a series of works by artists on social media, including things by Louise Bourgeois, Francesca Woodman, and Gertrude Abercrombie amongst others, whose work featured lone women either in the home, merging into their habitats, or becoming one with their surroundings. While I led with examples from Bourgeois’ Femme Maison series (1946–47), I choose to focus on Woodman and Abercrombie rather than this partiuclar artist. Seeing as I am currently in a spate of DIY, and as the nights are drawing in, I have been thinking about this piece and how interiority and domesticity appeared in Bourgeois' work.
“You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
In 1938, Louise Bourgeois left France and arrived in New York City. She had just married the American art historian Robert Goldwater, and New York’s skyscrapers soon became a feature of her works. In her celebrated illustrated book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), Bourgeois wrote, “My skyscrapers reflect a human condition,” or personifications of loneliness, alienation, anger, and hostility.
For Bourgeois (who had initially trained as a mathematician), architecture offered structure, order, and a form of stability for tumultuous states of mind, and very often resolves from sites of personal dramas as she rendered her vivid memories and emotions in symbolic form (drawn from memories of her childhood home in Choisy-le-Roe to New York’s Institute of Fine Arts where her husband worked). Dwellings became motifs of Bourgeois’ works, ‘from organically shaped plaster lairs in the 1960s to room-scale enclosures called Cells that dominated the later years.’
During the 1940s, while working on Femme Maison, Bourgeois was raising three small boys, and attempting to forge a bridge between her identities as an artist and stay-at-home mother. As the curator Deborah Wye writes, ‘she [Bourgeois] chose architectural imagery to, in effect, suffocate this woman. It’s kind of dire, in a way.’ Yet there remains a sense of resolve in the woman's upright posture, her refusal to bend and slouch. She refuses to relinquish her dignity.
Architecture was a motif Bourgeois used throughout her career to symbolise her feelings, and she saw architectural structures as a place of refuge, she also noted its trappings and confinements.
“Our own body could be considered from a topographical point of view,” Bourgeois said, “a land with mounds and valleys, and caves and holes.” During the 1960s and 1970s, she created marble works ‘filled with forms resembling breasts, penises, and undulating landscapes, all simultaneously.’ The Destruction of the Father — a charged, claustrophobic room crammed with bulbous, erotically charged latex protuberances and scattered animal limbs — was followed with Confrontation, which set the stage for a performance titled A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts. This suggestiveness later gave way to realism, with sculptures, drawings, and prints of eyes, ears, hands, and lips all accentuate the functions of the senses, but in their disembodiment also conjure up the eerie Surrealist world of dreams and nightmares.’
As Dorothea Tanning said,
At night one imagines all sorts of happenings in the shadows of the darkness. A hotel bedroom is both intimate and unfamiliar, almost alienation, and this can conjure a feeling of menace and unknown forces at play. But these unknown forces are a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.
As I wrote in my February 2022 newsletter (Dorothea Tanning: Doors, Darkness, Dreams):
The domestic is always reoccurring in Tanning's work — including in her gorgeously sensual Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202) (1970-73), where soft sculptures of women’s torsos protrude from ripped walls. The installation consists of materials including fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, Ping-Pong balls, and, of course, an open door. As Katherine Conley stated, ‘Tanning’s paintings redefine domestic space for young women as claustrophobic, haunted by malevolent spirits: “we are waging a desperate a desperate battle with unknown forces”’.
While Tanning evokes the dark eroticism of youth, Bourgeois notes the everyday sensuality of life experiences and domesticity. In the earlier mentioned Cells, Bourgeois places the viewer physically outside the object but invites them to peer inside as if gazing inward into their psyche. While once again commenting on safe havens as potential entrapment, she also considers the challenging dynamics of looking. ‘Reality changes with each new angle,’ Bourgeois said. ‘Mirrors can be seen as a vanity, but that is not all their meaning. The act of looking into a mirror is really about having the courage it takes to look at yourself and really face yourself.’