Louise Bourgeois The Woven Child

The Woven Child

Louise Bourgeois The Woven Child
‘A newly widowed woman collects the
top underwear of her late husband
unwashed, and makes a doll with
elastic and places it on her bed at his place –
smell of sweat – it is a symbol of life
smell of feet and caress of feet
Related to the bring me my
slippers.
smell of lavender lotion for the
hair stirs palpitations after
half a century past –
the white loose shirt over
the pants – kind of bomber jacket –
the back of the shirt spread out
over the back of the pants, after
having been in the bathroom. of the brother’1
 8 Foreword
Ralph Rugoff and Stephanie Rosenthal

10 Mechanisms of Ambiguity and Sensation:

The Late Fabric Sculptures of Louise Bourgeois
Ralph Rugoff

20 Weaving, Materials and Metaphor

Lynne Cooke

26 The Fabricated Woman

Rachel Cusk

32 Acts of Reparation: Spiders, Needles and

Cells in the Work of Louise Bourgeois
Julienne Lorz

Plates
38 Figures
70 Torsos
76 Heads
92 Cells
118 Poles
128 Towers
138 Late Vitrines
148 Fabric Drawings
168 Books / Suites
188 Works on Paper
194 Collages, Plaques and Prints

200 List of Exhibited Works

204 Author Biographies
205 Acknowledgements and Exhibition Credits
206 Image Credits and References
Foreword Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child is the first major retrospec-
tive to focus exclusively on the works that the artist made using
a variety of textiles during the final chapter of her storied career.
Bourgeois was already in her eighties when she began devel-
oping a diverse body of fabric-based sculptures, installations,
drawings, collages, books and prints. Over decades she had
accumulated a collection of clothing that included garments
that had belonged to her mother, and a wide selection of her
own clothes dating back to her childhood. One morning, some-
time in the mid-1990s, Bourgeois asked her long-time studio
assistant Jerry Gorovoy to gather up the contents of several
upstairs closets and bring them down to her basement studio.
She suspended the clothing, still on hangers, from pipes on
the ceiling, and later arranged them in groupings according to
colour. Garments that had a specific memory associated with
them, or that were evocative of certain people or places, were
kept intact. These were incorporated into sculptural installa-
tions, such as her Cells and her free-standing ‘pole pieces’, in
which their display conjures missing bodies or a sense of phys-
ical absence and loss. She took a different approach with more
contemporary items of clothing, as well as her table linens, nap-
kins, handkerchiefs and, later, tapestry fragments. From these
textiles, Bourgeois fashioned works that involved cutting up or
altering the original materials, reconfiguring and stuffing them
to create a range of remarkably expressive figurative forms.
Eventually she also worked with fabric to make dynamic abstract
drawings – some of which reference a spiderweb motif – and
intimate collages as well as books and prints.
Bourgeois’s connection to textiles originated in her child-
hood years when she assisted with the work in her family’s
tapestry restoration atelier in France. Her decision to create
artworks from her clothes and household textiles was a means
of transforming as well as preserving the past. She viewed the
actions involved in fabricating these works – cutting, ripping,
sewing, joining – in psychological and metaphorical terms,
relating them to notions of reparation and to the trauma of sep-
aration or abandonment. Rearticulating and elaborating upon
thematic threads that she had explored earlier in her career,
Bourgeois’s late fabric works are among her most compelling,
cogent and deeply personal creations. They seem just as star-
tlingly original and daring today as when she made them.
This exhibition would not have been possible without the
collaboration and support of The Easton Foundation. In par-
ticular, we are deeply grateful for the close and lively dialogue
8 9
throughout our entire planning process with Jerry Gorovoy, Schmaus, Project Manager Exhibitions Sophie Winckler, and
President of the Foundation, and its Curator, Philip Larratt- Exhibitions Fellows Sophie Schattner and Anna Viehoff. Their
Smith. They have played a significant role in ensuring that the hard work and professionalism was essential to this collaboration.
exhibition effectively represents the full scope of Bourgeois’s Our sincere thanks also go to Cait Schuyler of the Louise
work with textiles. We are also indebted to Maggie Wright, the Bourgeois Studio for her invaluable assistance with crucial
Foundation’s Executive Director, for sharing her insight and transport and loan-related issues, to Richard Bruce for his help
knowledge of the artist. with the images, and to Kendal Grady, Beth Higgins and Johee
An ambitious survey such as this would not be possible Kim from the Bourgeois Studio, and Sewon Kang and Hera
without the generosity of numerous lenders who have agreed HaeSoo Kim from The Easton Foundation.
to make available valuable and delicate works of art so that we Finally, we are grateful for the support of Arts Council
can present them to the public. A full list of lenders appears on England, and Southbank Centre, especially CEO Elaine Bedell,
page 205, but we would like to single out two lenders, in addi- Artistic Director Mark Ball and the Board of Governors. And we
tion to The Easton Foundation and the Louise Bourgeois Trust, wish to express our profound thanks to the Minister of State for
from whom we have borrowed multiple works: the Ursula Hauser Culture and the Media, Berlin, Berliner Festspiele and Charlotte
Collection and the Glenstone Foundation. This exhibition was Sieben, Managing Director, Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes
realised with the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation in Berlin (KBB) GmbH for their kind support.
Lucerne. We are also grateful for the indispensable support pro-
vided by Hauser & Wirth, Xavier Hufkens and Peder Lund, as well Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery
as The Woven Child Exhibition Supporters’ Group. Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Gropius Bau
For their original and astute contributions to this book, our
thanks go to curator and scholar Lynne Cooke, novelist Rachel
Cusk and curator Julienne Lorz. Hayward Gallery Publications
Manager Lucy Biddle has done an excellent job of supervising
almost all aspects of this catalogue. We are also very apprecia-
tive of Katy Nelson’s notable work designing this elegant book,
for Joseph Logan Design. The team at our co-publishers, Hatje
Cantz, including Adam Jackman, Stefanie Kruszyk and Lena
Kiessler, deserve our gratitude for all their expert work produc-
ing this publication.
On the Hayward Gallery curatorial team, Assistant Curator
Katie Guggenheim and Curatorial Assistant Marie-Charlotte
Carrier skilfully managed the many tasks involved in research-
ing and preparing the exhibition and continually brought fresh
perspectives to issues around how best to present the artist’s
work. As always, the Hayward’s Senior Registrars Imogen Winter
and Charlotte Pearson capably managed the complex arrange-
ment of transporting work from across Europe and the US. The
Hayward Operations team, led by Juliane Heynert and Senior
Technicians Will Clifford and Sarah Tetheridge, deserve praise
for ensuring a successful and safe installation.
At Gropius Bau, our thanks go to the entire curatorial
team, in particular Former Chief Curator Julienne Lorz, Associate
Curator, Director’s Office Laura Schmidt, Curatorial Assistant
Sarah Crowe, Head of Exhibitions and Productions Simone
Mechanisms of Ambiguity and Sensation:
The Late Fabric Sculptures of Louise Bourgeois
Ralph Rugoff ‘I am not interested in the body; I am interested in
the mechanism.’1
Over a period beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing up
until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois created an astonish-
ingly inventive, and often psychologically harrowing, range of
sculptures using domestic textiles including clothing, linens,
terry cloth towels and tapestry fragments, often sourced from
her own household and personal history. While these late works
explored some of the motifs and concerns of her earlier art –
sexuality, familial trauma, the ambivalence of human relation-
ships – they also introduced a fuller articulation of the figure
and face, as well as an expanded and at times more intimate
emotional register, due in part to the personal character and
softness of their materials. Primarily focused on the female
form, Bourgeois’s panoply of soft bodies and orphaned ana-
tomical parts can be disconcertingly confrontational while also
conveying a sharp-edged poignance, especially when invoking
abject and distressed states of being. In a broad sense, these
fabric sculptures continued the unswerving exploration of ambi-
guity that comprised the core aesthetic strategy of the artist’s
earlier oeuvre. Bourgeois’s description of a work from the 1960s
as being ‘simple in outline but elusive and ambivalent in its ref-
erences’ aptly applies to most of her late sculpture as well.2 A
carnivalesque vein that veers from the macabre to the fantastic
also weaves in and out of these late sculptures; amidst notes of
loss and desolation, one encounters flashes of mordant humour.
Among Bourgeois’s earliest fabric sculptures are a grim
group of dark monochrome figures first exhibited in 1996, includ-
ing both single bodies and copulating couples, all roughly life-
sized but bereft of hands, feet and heads. Hung upside down
from a hooked ring, Single I (1996) [p. 39] is a crudely crafted
bodily form stitched together in horizontal sections that vary in
tone from shades of grey to black. While it might initially bring to
mind thoughts of a tortured and mutilated body, this association
is undermined by the agency implied in its outstretched arms,
which reach out to either side in a strikingly symmetrical pose.
Meanwhile its outer fabric shell sags slightly, not unlike skin,
from the weight of its inner stuffing. Classical statues made of
‘permanent’ materials are said to awaken our feelings of mor-
tality as we realise they will outlive us, but a sculpture such as
this, composed from soft and perishable textiles, evokes the
body’s vulnerability much more directly, arousing our latent
awareness that we are all essentially sacks of skin hung around
Couple III, 1997
a structure of bones and stuffed with blood and organs. Hung
out to dry, as it were, Single I suggests a body abandoned to a
form of display that is usually reserved for slabs of meat in an
abattoir or a butcher’s window.3 In this respect, it can be seen
as a cipher for a kind of extreme exposure. Significantly, it is a
female figure that Bourgeois chose to present in this way. But
the artist was not only interested in calling out society’s ongoing
history of framing women’s bodies as objects of spectacle; in
Couple III and Couple IV (both 1997) [pp. 40 and 41], she evoked
bodily objectification in a manner that also implicates a culture
in which visuality itself is pervasively fetishised. In both these
works, a pair of black headless bodies, stacked in missionary
position, are enclosed within wooden vitrines that conjure a
claustrophobic, almost coffin-like sense of containment, as if
underscoring the oppressive nature of male-dominated het-
erosexual relationships as well as suggesting the obsessive
character of attachments that are driven by a psychological
fear of abandonment. The ‘female’ figure in each vitrine sports
a prosthetic limb – a leather and metal arm in Couple III and a
lace-up leather thigh brace and moulded plastic leg and foot
in Couple IV. Bourgeois commented on at least one occasion
that she incorporated prosthetic devices in certain figurative
sculptures as a metaphor for psychological injury or handicap,
but in these two strikingly morbid couplings they also summon
the spectre of a fetishistic sexuality, in which desire is refocused
11
MECHANISMS OF AMBIGUITY AND SENSATION RALPH RUGOFF

around inanimate surrogates while the body itself – which is

presented in these works as if a preserved specimen in a sex
museum – is regarded as a lifeless object.4
Arguably, this kind of displacement finds its most pervasive
expression in the fashion industry, a subject to which Bourgeois
seemingly alludes in two other works made around this time.
Made from several fragments of clothing, in varied shades of grey
and black, High Heels (1998) [pp. 42–43] presents a kneeling and
armless female figure, about half life-sized, with absurdly bul-
bous butt cheeks held aloft and its featureless head lying forward.
Legs held together with rough stitches culminate in a pair of shiny
steel high-heeled shoes (that most exemplary fetish object) in a
brutally satiric conflation of fashion, sex and degradation. As a
representation of a female figure, it is unflinchingly abject.
Writing in the 1930s, the philosopher Walter Benjamin
declared that fashion is the medium that ‘lures [sex] ever deeper
into the inorganic world’, describing it as ‘the dialectical switch-
ing station between woman and commodity, desire and dead
body.’5 That description seems to resonantly echo not only with
a work like High Heels, but also with Untitled (1996) [p. 119],
one of several sculptural installations (loosely termed ‘pole
pieces’) Bourgeois made using steel display stands, on which
Untitled, 1996 (detail)
she draped, often from hangers made of bones, elegant items
of women’s clothing taken from her own wardrobe as well as
clothes from her childhood and others that had belonged to her
mother. Some writers, such as Linda Nochlin, have seen these
sculptures as memorialising the artist’s ‘own lost youthful sexy bronze figure Arch of Hysteria (1993). Compared to the gleam-
body’ or as a kind of ghostly invocation of past stages in her ing, unbroken surface of that sculpture, however, Untitled is an
life.6 But the biting gallows humour evident in this series points ungainly construction composed of layers of black and white
beyond personal remembrance; indeed, these works seem to fabric that are loosely stitched together, leaving gaps in places
pointedly insinuate that fashion, as Benjamin noted, ‘was never that make visible its inner stuffing. Unlike classical depictions of
High Heels, 1998 (detail)
anything but the parody of the gaily decked out corpse.’7 a torso, this sculpture suggests an anatomical section orphaned
When the design of clothing focuses attention (and desire) from any possible association with an intact, whole body. In
on specific bodily parts, fashion inevitably promotes the frag- place of representing a coherent visual form, it conveys a strong
mentation of the living body, as if seeking to transform it into impression of physical tension, inviting us to imagine inhabiting
a mirror image of the mannequin’s segmented and detachable a body traversed, even torn asunder, by internal pressures.
anatomy. Bourgeois, who was no stranger to the effects and Untitled (1998) [p. 72] offers a more recognisable but equally
powers of fashion, made several sculptures with clothing and disconcerting image of a torso – in this case, one that is identifi-
textiles that depict corporeal fragments as partial and disar- ably female. Fashioned with a mix of diaphanous beige and dark
ticulated forms. The appearance of some of these works is so brown stockings that are stitched together over an underlying
odd that they are difficult to describe. Encased in a wood and armature made from metal bedsprings, it presents a clear outline
glass vitrine, Untitled (1996) [p. 71] has the general shape of a of shoulders and neck as well as two ball-like breasts. A small
truncated torso with an arched back, a posture that Bourgeois oblong form with a vertical slit down its middle – an appendage
explored in several pieces, including the life-sized hanging that suggests an exteriorised vaginal opening – sits between

12 13
MECHANISMS OF AMBIGUITY AND SENSATION
two gaping holes roughly placed where legs would attach to
hips. In modernist sculpture beginning with Rodin, depictions of
isolated bodily parts were traditionally understood as stand-ins
for the absent whole, but the appearance of Bourgeois’s visibly
hollow sculpture – at once baroque and schematic – subverts
any possible association with an absent Platonic completeness.
Its motley depiction of female form, meanwhile, seems to simul-
taneously subvert and implicate a type of voyeuristic gaze that
has been shaped by Western art’s canonised history of female
nudes, created largely by male artists for male audiences. At the
same time, through its use of particular materials that we are
accustomed to feeling against our skin, this work – like many
of the artist’s other fabric sculptures – activates a dimension
of haptic sensation and tactile association that opens up our
encounter beyond a purely visual engagement.
As early as the 1960s, Bourgeois had made a number of
sculptures, such as Fillette or Janus Fleuri (both 1968), that con-
flate characteristics of male and female genitalia and body parts,
presenting ambiguous compounded forms that confound fac-
ile identification and resist conventional delineations of gender
boundaries. Some of Bourgeois’s later fabric sculptures deploy a
similar hybridising strategy but arguably in a more extensive and
radical manner. Cell XXI (Portrait) (2000) [p. 97] features a tan-
gled construction of pink and white fabric that can not only be
alternately read as referencing bits of male and female genitalia,
but that also possibly depicts a pair of breasts as well as upside-
down facial features and abstract topographies. The ambigu-
ity in a work such as this goes beyond a simple combining of
‘opposites’ and instead engages the viewer in an experience
of slipping from one (often unrelated) association to another in
an unresolvable process of interpretation. Bourgeois manages
this semantic derailing, in part at least, by de-emphasising and
scrambling visual definition while activating associations of tac-
tile encounters through her use of soft, ‘huggable’ materials.
This kind of ‘portrait’ appeals less to our eyes than to memo-
ries related to our most intimate sense – touch. The categorical
fuzziness engineered by these soft sculptures, in other words,
is facilitated by their fuzzy surfaces.
Perhaps the most humble of all Bourgeois’s body-part
sculptures, Femme (2005) [p. 74] seems to hover around an
aesthetic degree zero. Crudely referencing a female torso, it
comprises a rectangular cushion-like form with a pair of round
lumpy protuberances stitched onto its top at one end and a
(presumably vaginal) opening sewn into the side at its opposite
14
RALPH RUGOFF
end. Along with its threadbare tapestry fabric and rudimen-
tary stitching, the sculpture’s composition and facture are so
strikingly reductive that the work seems to oscillate between
organic, bodily reference and geometric or architectural form.
Creating works that precariously straddle the boundary between
art and non-art is an approach that some of Bourgeois’s influen-
tial twentieth-century colleagues such as Eva Hesse and Marcel
Duchamp also explored, often as a means of underscoring the
arbitrariness of the conventions by which art is defined at a par-
ticular moment in time. In Bourgeois’s fabric sculpture, however,
it is pointedly a representation of female form that is put into
question through this threshold aesthetic, so that these bodies
seem at once to mockingly summon, and to short-circuit, a cat-
egorising and objectifying gaze while conveying, through a kind
of visual analogy, sensations related to dejection and alienation.
In Bourgeois’s soft sculptures, a composite style of fabri-
cation frequently enhances and echoes the fragment-like char-
acter of the many partial bodies that she fashioned. Knife Figure
(2002) [p. 56], which reiterates a motif that Bourgeois had
explored in several earlier sculptures, is an interesting example
to consider in this regard. It belongs to a group of figures made
of fabric and various kitchen utensils, many of which feature fan-
tastical bodies that call to mind characters from unsettling fairy
tales or a doll-sized chamber of horrors. In the earlier marble
versions (titled Femme Couteau), the female figure and the knife
are merged into a single unified hybrid; as Bourgeois noted,
‘the woman turns into a blade’.8 Despite their aggressive con-
tent, these carved sculptures, which are elegantly reductive in
their depiction of the body, relate to a modernist sculptural bias
towards generalised and ‘archetypal’ form. By contrast, Knife
Figure, which features an actual knife with a wooden handle
menacingly suspended over the torso of a headless pink body,
presents its core components as distinctly specific and separate
parts. The female figure, armless and with a partially ‘amputated’
leg, is rendered in this work as an emphatically incomplete (if
not to say dismembered) fragment. As in most of Bourgeois’s
fabric sculptures, the very notion of wholeness appears here as
no more than a distant dream.
In 1998, at the age of eighty-six, Bourgeois began making a series
of fabric heads that became a key focus of her sculptural output
over much of the following decade. Considering the many head-
less figures that appear throughout her oeuvre and given the
increased emphasis in her fabric sculptures on bodily fragments,
Cell XXI (Portrait), 2000 (detail)
15
MECHANISMS OF AMBIGUITY AND SENSATION
this might initially have seemed like a surprising development. In
sculpture, after all, a head almost inevitably stands for a whole
person; more than any other part of the body, we regard the head
– and the face in particular – as the principal locus of the self, the
screen on which our inner emotions and character are made vis-
ible. With this late series Bourgeois produced some of the most
arresting, emotionally layered and formally ingenious sculptures
of heads produced in the past hundred years.
Bourgeois’s fabric heads are not so much portraits of par-
ticular individuals as evocations of diverse, and often ambiva-
lent, mental and emotional states. For the most part, they have
no clearly identifiable gender; nevertheless, each one is highly
distinctive, differentiated by the type of fabric utilised and how
it is cut and sewn, as well as by the varying specificity of their
facial features. Pierre (1998) [p. 78] was named after Bourgeois’s
younger brother, and so may be considered the one exception
that depicts, at least symbolically, an actual person (writer
and curator Robert Storr has described this sculpture as ‘an
anguished and anguishing posthumous portrait of [Bourgeois’s]
institutionalized brother.’9) Composed of irregularly cut sections
of pink jersey joined together by clumsy stitching, and bear-
ing asymmetrical features – a single ear, a gaping mouth, one
eye closed and the other open – Pierre is a portrait of off-kilter
pieces. Lying on its side as though its soft, battered-looking
material was incapable of maintaining upright posture, this
sculptural head summons the spectre of a ‘lost’ soul, someone
adrift and vulnerable.
In another pink-jersey head made that same year,
Bourgeois greatly amplified the accent on her medium’s mate-
rial precarity. Untitled (1998) [p. 79], which stands upright on
a base, looks like a radically deteriorated version of Pierre (it
similarly features an open mouth and a single ear). Resembling
a moth-devoured mask, the pink ‘skin’ of the face is a patchwork
of gaps and holes, revealing the shaggy white stuffing material
of the sculpture’s core. As with many of Bourgeois’s less dis-
tressed-looking heads, this work evokes a disconcerting and
tender pathos – a sentiment that arises, at least in part, from
our almost unavoidable tendency to identify with images of the
human face. This can lead us in turn to read the deliberately
‘flawed’ facture of these sculptures – their awkward construc-
tion or seeming state of disrepair – as signifying bodily decay or
damage of one kind or another. Writing of these works, curator
Frances Morris has noted that they ‘create the impression of
hastily bandaged victims of fire or creatures shaped by horrific
16
facial surgery’, while adding that their crudely sewn seams are
‘suggestive of hastily sealed wounds, bodies repaired but for-
ever scarred.’10 It is then a relatively small step to extrapolate
that these signs of physical trauma are metaphors for emotional
scarring, which would essentially frame these sculptures as
vehicles of expressionist angst.
But this is not the only possible interpretative track opened
up by these multilayered artworks. The unkempt looseness of
the sewing – as with basting or a running stitch – conveys a
sense of immediacy. It invites us to imagine the possibility of
these piecemeal constructions being undone, dismantled and
potentially reconfigured, and at the same time to muse over
related meanings that similarly cannot be decisively locked
down, but remain precariously unbound. From another per-
spective, the ‘deliberate ferocity of [the] bad sewing’, as Linda
Nochlin has observed, simultaneously evokes ‘old age, which
cripples virtuosity, or regression to childhood, the time before it
is acquired.’11 Teeming with ambiguities, these late sculptures –
like almost all of the artist’s work – engage us in an open-ended
process of considering and forging alternative interpretations.
In some of the head sculptures, the borders of recognis-
able features are redrawn, or drawn over, through the use of line
and colour or through tactile surface textures that effectively
corporealise the face. In this way, a number of Bourgeois’s heads
take on, often with carnivalesque flair, the politics of the face as
sovereign signifier of a subjectivity cleanly divorced from the rest
of bodily experience.12 Consider Untitled (2002) [p. 83], a head
composed of fragments of needlepoint embroidery. Ornamental
geometries sprawl across its features like an elaborate and intri-
cate tattoo, derailing our vision into a scrambled pictorial land-
scape in which a human face seems to alternately appear and
vanish. Hinting at a multidimensional topology of identity, this
bodiless head manages to evince a polymorphous corporeality.
In another untitled sculpture made that same year [p. 84],
Bourgeois created a kind of eerie double portrait: on the side of
the head, she placed a section of tapestry that depicts an oddly
misshapen visage, which appears in this context as if a shadowy
second self. Untitled (2009) [p. 90], a sculpture featuring four
faces, each looking in a different direction, further expands on
this motif of multiple identities, while also recalling the artist’s
many drawings of Janus-like faces. Three faces, each bearing
distinctly different expressions, are rendered in a grey textile; in
contrast, the fourth is graphically divided by bold blue and red
lines that swerve like unleashed nerves across a quilted expanse
of mesh-patterned fabric. For all its disorienting strangeness,
looking at this expanded landscape of a head can seem like an
uncannily familiar experience as it aptly analogises ambivalent
and contradictory mental states well known to us all.
From 2005 to 2010, Bourgeois produced a significant
series of work that was quite unlike anything she had made pre-
viously. In each of the four sculptures in this series, the artist
placed separate artworks side by side in a large wooden vitrine,
setting up enigmatic relationships between them. Showcasing
works of art in an almost clinical manner as if they were spec-
imens in a display case, these composite installations feature
examples of Bourgeois’s sculpture that lean towards an abstract
figuration, only obliquely anthropomorphic in its references.
Consequently, they do not solicit the immediate emotional
response triggered by so many of her figurative sculptures; the
theatrical glass enclosure, meanwhile, further mutes and con-
tains their sensuous tactile character, framing them as virtual
or metaphysical objects.
These works seem to ask for a distanced gaze, as if we
were being summoned to study not a work of art so much as
its inner mechanisms. There is also a sense of a backwards
glance: almost all of the individual components reference prior
sculptures by the artist (throughout her career, it is worth not-
ing, Bourgeois had consistently revisited and reimagined forms
and themes from her earlier artworks). Two of the vitrines fea-
ture works from Bourgeois’s series of fabric ‘towers’ – narrow
stacks of neatly fabricated textile bricks or lozenges which, in
their repetitive, linear structure and vertical posture, recall the
segmented wooden forms she began assembling in 1950. Also
appearing in two of the large vitrines are accumulations of cof-
fee- and tea-stained sack-like objects, either deflated-looking
or stuffed, that continue Bourgeois’s exploration, begun in the
early 1990s, into the metaphorical possibilities of receptacle-like
forms that might conjure an empty womb or desiccated breasts.
A third type of sculpture is included in all four works: a steel
spooling tree with thread bobbins placed on its outstretched
arms, from which threads connect to a rubber teardrop-shaped
form that limply hangs from a hook. This biomorphic form is one
that Bourgeois used repeatedly throughout much of her career,
initially in drawings made in the 1940s. The overall ensemble,
meanwhile, recalls the artist’s 1992 sculpture In Respite [p. 121].
The sense of a retrospective gaze reaches a climax in
the final work of the series. Made the year of the artist’s death,
Untitled (2010) [p. 145] pairs a version of the spooling tree
RALPH RUGOFF
sculpture with a stainless-steel table on which rests a cush-
ion-like torso replete with an orifice-like opening at one end.
Like a scene from an autopsy, it seemingly presents a post-
humous surrogate of the artist’s own body. The figure’s miss-
ing head symbolically reappears atop its torso as a grouping of
stuffed berets, signifier of the French artistic and intellectual
milieu of Bourgeois’s youth in Paris. But these in turn, with their
pointed nipple-like peaks, suggest a landscape of hills or alter-
nately an abundant pile of breasts, a motif explored in some of
the artist’s earlier sculptures. These sliding chains of associa-
tions, along with the work’s intermingling of soft textiles and
hard steel as well as bodily and non-figurative elements, require
us to keep changing our frames of reference. For all the clinical
transparency of its display, nothing is made self-evident here,
no single corpus of meaning is dissected and revealed; instead,
Untitled functions like a generator of metaphorical associations.
Bourgeois’s last large vitrine also recalls the long asso-
ciation of figurative sculpture with funerary displays and com-
memorative statuary. It has been said that the first figurative
sculpture was a corpse, inasmuch as it is an object onto which
we might project (initially at least) some trace of life. Though
this ancient association has faded over time, an aura of death
continues to haunt sculptural representations of the human
body, as well as effigies, puppets and fetishes, all of which
invoke, by default, a sense of absent life. Yet in its radical rewrit-
ing of the conventions and possibilities of figurative sculpture,
Bourgeois’s final vitrine works point elsewhere. While they
invoke memory and biographical history, these artworks remain
thrillingly elusive, as if gesturing towards a model of remem-
brance that also commemorates all that cannot be recalled and
recollected – above all, perhaps, the once endless expanse of
corporeal experience and pleasure that we are required to sub-
limate as the price of our civilised existence. That spectre of
repressed bodily life reappears here in uncanny and moribund
forms, but it is balanced by the intimation that art is simul-
taneously a means of fashioning new threads of connection.
Bourgeois’s last major sculptures point to the manner in which
art – for all its material deadness – revivifies its audience by
opening up new lines of thought and feeling, and renewing the
possibilities of how we envision our relations to ourselves, to
others and to our shared predicaments.
Artist Adrian Piper has extolled Bourgeois’s art for reminding us
‘of the chasm that separates the corporeal and infantile beings
17
MECHANISMS OF AMBIGUITY AND SENSATION
that we are from the cerebral, self-governing agents we tell our-
selves we are.’13 This remark seems particularly applicable to
Bourgeois’s fabric sculptures: with their de-sublimated depic-
tions of figures and faces, these works confront us with intima-
tions of a fluid, multiform subjectivity that calls into question our
socially sanctioned, coherent self-images. One of art’s great and
enduring roles, as Piper’s comment implies, is to help us to see
past our relentless efforts at self-forgetting; Bourgeois’s soft
sculptures manage to enact this role with a bracingly visceral
and multilevelled resonance that few artworks in any medium
ever manage to achieve. More than one writer has described
Bourgeois’s turn to working with fabric late in her life as a return
to the material of her childhood, when she worked in the ate-
lier of her family’s tapestry restoration business. Yet the char-
acter of this ‘return’ was hardly a straightforward revisiting; to
some extent it recalls Karl Marx’s aphorism that history repeats
itself, first as tragedy and secondly as farce. Bourgeois’s fabric
sculptures, after all, suggest a complete inversion or caricature
of the activity that defined the family workshop of her youth.
Rather than repairing textiles in order to make them appear
intact again, the artist cut up remnants of tapestries and cloth-
ing and refashioned them into patchwork constructions, some
of which are stitched together in a deliberately clumsy manner
that seems like a parody of conventional sewing. But perhaps in
one respect, inasmuch as her childhood job in the family atelier
was to draw in the body parts missing from damaged tapes-
tries – mostly absent feet – Bourgeois’s late work did indeed
constitute a return of sorts to this early activity with its focus on
fragments. And though most of her fabric sculptures may fail to
correspond to our usual sense of repair as mending, they never-
theless comprise a mode of restoration: directing us away from
idealised conceptions of pristine wholeness, they unflinchingly
restore our sense of the motley and multifarious character of
our psychic life. In the process they remind us that there are no
ultimate truths in art – only metamorphoses, and the various
dislocations, repositionings and replacements with which they
are engineered.
In turning the notion of a restoration workshop on its head,
Bourgeois in her soft sculptures found ways to open up the pos-
Louise Bourgeois with her berets as a fabric sculpture in progress in 2010.
sibilities of plastic ambiguity – and the attendant slippages of
signification that it enables – to a degree perhaps unmatched by
any of her previous sculptures in more traditional media. In what
must surely count as one of the greatest late-career chapters in
the history of art, she forged with fabric a final body of work in
18
RALPH RUGOFF
which lifelong concerns – with destabilising boundaries, ambig-
uous sexualities, sliding registers of meaning and non-binary
identities – were revisited in newly provocative and profoundly
enlivening ways. A decade after her death, these works continue
to challenge us with questions that seem more compelling and
urgent than ever.
1 Louise Bourgeois, ‘Text prepared for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, 1985’, in Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of
the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923–1997, eds. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans
Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998), p. 219.
2 Louise Bourgeois in Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman,
Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), p. 118.
3 It is worth mentioning here that, as a suspended figure, Single I is hardly an
exception in the artist’s practice; Bourgeois had been similarly hanging some of her
sculptures since the mid-1960s, including quasi-figurative bronze works such as The
Quartered One (1964–65) that likewise evoked associations with a hung carcass.
4 For Bourgeois’s comments on these works, see ‘Blue Days and Pink Days’ in
Bourgeois 1998 (see note 1), p. 362.
5 All quotes from Walter Benjamin appear in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of
Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),
p. 101.
6 Linda Nochlin, ‘Old Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois’, in Frances Morris, ed.,
Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. Tate Modern (London, 2007), p. 189.
7 Walter Benjamin in Buck-Morss 1991 (see note 5), p. 101.
8 Louise Bourgeois in ‘A Merging of Male and Female’, in Dorothy Seiberling,
‘The Female View of Erotica’, New York Magazine (11 February 1974); reprinted in
Bourgeois 1998, p. 101.
9 Robert Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (New
York: The Monacelli Press, 2016), p. 531.
10 Morris 2007 (see note 6), pp. 120 and 17.
11 Ibid., p. 191.
12 For a discussion of the politics of the face, see ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, in Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London:
Continuum Books, 2004), p. 167.
13 Adrian Piper in Charlotta Kotik, Christian Leigh and Terrie Sultan, Louise
Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982–1993, exh. cat. Brooklyn Museum (New
York: H.N. Abrams, 1994), p. 79.
19
Weaving, Materials and Metaphor
Lynne Cooke ‘I have found the medium of weaving incompatible with the art of
the sculptor’, Louise Bourgeois stated as she surveyed an exhi-
Bourgeois’s formal strictures in their nuanced handling of space
and volume, but also shared something of the abstract biomor-
bition of fibre art at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New phic vocabulary with which she was then preoccupied. In her
York, in 1969.1 Forthright and direct, Bourgeois didn’t mince her assessment, Bourgeois was not constrained by allegiance to the
words. None among the ensemble of mostly woven textiles by entrenched hierarchies that segregated studio crafts from their
some twenty-eight artists from seven countries met her criteria. domestic counterparts – evidenced in the routine dismissal of
‘The emptiness and the fullness which is essential to the space what was regarded as women’s work: embroidery, knitting, cro-
and volume of sculpture is not present’, she argued.2 chet and the like – in favour of the highly prized skills of specialised
Bourgeois had been invited to review Wall Hangings, the artisans. Weighing the relative merits of the diverse approaches in
first exhibition of contemporary weaving at the museum, by the a show that, on balance, she found lacked ‘daring’, she concluded
editor of Craft Horizons, then the leading journal of its kind in the provocatively, ‘The crochet method can lead to great expanses of
US. Like the show’s curators, the editor was deeply committed to imagination, whereas the loom is a very rigid tool.’3
what she claimed was a new genre, one which warranted recog- Only in the wake of a radical change in her practice in the
nition as fine art, though it employed techniques typically associ- early 1990s, which writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith has iden-
ated with craft – weaving, knotting, braiding and crochet, among tified as marking ‘the pivot in her art away from the father and
others. Bourgeois demurred. While she acknowledged that many toward the mother’, did Bourgeois engage substantially with the
of the innovative textiles were ‘delightful’, she contended they problematics of weaving.4 In the art she would subsequently make,
did not make exigent demands of the viewer as did a work of art. her psychic identifications with the maternal, which she associ-
Bourgeois’s credentials for this task were impeccable. ated with reparation, are variously manifested in her privileging
Though considerably older than Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and of textiles and sewing as material and technique, and, in terms of
their peers, she was included with them in Lucy Lippard’s 1966 subject matter, two motifs, which she imbued with meaning, affect
landmark exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. In her essay, Lippard and expressive import – the spider and the filament.
identified an emergent form of abstract sculpture that deployed Homing in on a long-standing need to create her ‘own artist
soft, supple forms made from such materials as cord, string and world of omnipotence + fantasy’, Bourgeois began to construct
cloth to elicit highly tactile sensual responses. And then there was
Bourgeois’s long history with textile weaving; her family’s busi-
ness was the restoration and retail of vintage tapestries. While
still a girl she had been drawn to the workshop, located in the
suburbs outside of Paris. As a dessinateur she helped sketch feet
and other missing parts in the damaged pieces, which her mother
and the tapestry weavers would then repair. Trained by her father
to take on the business when she came of age, she rebelled.
A compromise was eventually reached whereby the Boulevard
Saint-Germain gallery in Paris was partitioned in two sections,
with one devoted to the restored tapestries for sale, and the other
to the prints and drawings by modern artists on which Bourgeois
pinned her hopes. This division embodied a fundamental psychic
ambivalence that she would resolve only decades later when she
herself created works of art from handwoven cloth.
Among the cohort of experimental weavers showcased at
MoMA in 1969 were such rising stars as Sheila Hicks and Lenore
Tawney. However, Bourgeois singled out Ewa Jaroszyńska as
her favourite. Jaroszyńska’s modest contribution – two small-
ish objects, crocheted from sisal and hemp – not only fulfilled
Ewa Jaroszyńska, Cocoons 1, 1967
21
WEAVING, MATERIALS AND METAPHOR
La Mère a Couper le Cordon, 1986
tightly controlled environments that she termed Cells, and intro-
duced modes of assemblage, sometimes in tandem with carving
and modelling.5 Many of the found objects incorporated both into
the Cells and in free-standing sculptures were valued because
they were intimately connected to her past, as seen in Cell VII
(1998) [pp. 93–95], for example, which features clothing that had
belonged to her mother, or, as in Pink Days and Blue Days (1997),
with garments that she herself had worn, in childhood and later.
By contrast, the spools of thread, which quickly became ubiq-
uitous in her work, convey a more unsettling range of allusions,
as two closely related sculptures, In Respite (1992) [p. 121] and
Sutures (1993), reveal. A seamstress, like Bourgeois’s mother,
typically employs her thread as a connective: binding separate
22
elements together; joining that which formerly was autono-
mous; reuniting fragments into wholes. Sutures, with its spools
of beige and white thread perched on the limbs of a branching
metal armature, their ends looping through needles stuck into
an elongated rubber ‘pincushion’, pays tribute to that redemptive
labour. With almost identical compositional elements, In Respite,
by comparison, is disturbing. Dark presences, its tightly woven
black bobbins are withholding, ominous, without issue.
For Bourgeois, the small bronze Spider (1997) with sewing
needles at the ready was kin to her mother: it, too, was ‘a repair-
er’.6 Scaled up in a Cell, also titled Spider (1997) [pp. 109–13], the
now-imposing arachnid straddles a cage whose walls of woven
wire-mesh are adorned with fragments of tapestry. Customised
for a single occupant, the interior with its similarly upholstered
armchair becomes a haven, or, perhaps better, a cribbed refuge.
Like the unspooling thread, the spider is an affordance for a
complex register of emotions. In her review of Wall Hangings
in 1969, Bourgeois recalled that, as a child, she had wrapped
tapestries around her body, using them as places to hide. These
improvised sanctuaries – in effect, tents – were, she later real-
ised, ‘a form of textile sculpture to be entered.’7
Bourgeois’s recurrent allusions in her copious writing, as
in her art, to notions of severing and suture – to separation, loss
and abandonment – and, conversely, to recuperation, reparation
and rehabilitation are grounded in childhood memories and orig-
inary fantasies alike.8 Images of scissors, for example, occur in
a number of works on paper from 1986, including Spit or Star [p.
189] and La Mère a Couper le Cordon (The Mother Cut the Cord),
which shows a woman severing her umbilical cord. At the bottom
of that sheet, along with two pairs of scissors, the artist added
a text characterising this act of separation as a ‘castration’, an
‘abandonment’ tantamount to a kind of death. Identifying with
the child in that archetypal dyad, she noted, ‘I am the waste/I
am the cut one.’
While the spider and unspooling thread were freighted with
personal signification for Bourgeois, both are replete with clas-
sical allusions as she doubtless knew. In Metamorphoses, Ovid
provides an aetiology for the former in the tale of Arachne who
foolishly contested Athena’s pre-eminence in the art of weaving.
Enraged that she had been bested, the goddess transformed the
upstart maiden into a spider bound forever to spin and weave.
Thread lies also at the heart of a haunting myth featuring the
Three Fates who control the destinies of mortals. In Hesiod’s
version, Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos,
LYNNE COOKE
‘the inflexible one’, who terminates each human life with an irrep-
arable snip of her scissors, all take the form of old women.
In the 2000s, thread and filament became correlates in
Bourgeois’s art. Within her extensive series of fabric drawings,
begun in 2002, a sizeable contingent is made from cloth that,
after being cut into pieces, was sewn back together with its lin-
ear patterns now realigned. The machined vectors radiate from
centres or nodal points at right angles to the printed stripes,
in configurations that resemble webs and/or stars.9 In several
instances, more than one striped fabric has been employed,
making the overall design more complex without, however, dis-
pelling the effect of a discharge spreading from a navel. In the
rare double-sided versions, the graphic trajectory of the seams
is enhanced by the exposed edges of cloth. Those containing Weaving Word, ca. 1969
several differently scaled starburst forms evoke a constellation
or a cluster of spiderwebs nestled together. And yet others, their
rays truncated, appear to zoom in on the charged motif, as if in a
close-up.10 Like the lairs, burrows and coverts that proliferated
in her work in the 1960s and the Cells that began in the early
1990s, the webs were ‘a friendly refuge’ for Bourgeois, a locus
that the spider first wove then carefully tended.11
A second subgroup of fabric drawings develops the prop-
osition that textile works may be painting-adjacent, as opposed
to materialised drawings or surrogate sculptures. Eschewing
volume and space, each vibrant composition was made by join-
ing a piece of machine-made cloth to a handwoven one. In mul-
tiple ways, not least in their exploration of abstraction’s potential
for signification, they nod to antecedents within the history of
modernist art by pioneers such as Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay
and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
As so often in her practice, prior to taking what must have
been a highly charged step, Bourgeois tested the waters by
turning to printmaking.12 Impressing two inked pieces of jute
onto a sheet of paper in 2001, she created an image of a dam-
aged textile fragment she titled Weaving. Tellingly, no loom
would be used in 2002 in the series of abstractions she began
to weave from strips of torn cloth. Eschewing the apparatus
long considered integral, Bourgeois confirmed the negative
judgement she made of its potential in 1969. Though seemingly
radical, her decision to dispense with this ‘very rigid tool’ was
not fueled by a sudden conversion or a delayed recognition of
the viability of off-loom techniques of the kind espoused by the
Fibre movement’s vanguard, Hicks, Tawney and others. Rather,
it stems from personal experiences, arguably traceable back
Weaving, 2001
23
WEAVING, MATERIALS AND METAPHOR
You Are My Polar Star, 2009
to a humble plan, conceived the same year she assessed the
exhibits in MoMA’s Wall Hangings show, to weave a baby’s
blanket. That proposal, however, came to nothing. ‘I was told’,
she recalled years later, ‘it would be better to make a knitted
blanket … that it shouldn’t be woven … then I wouldn’t need a
loom.’13 In this retelling, Bourgeois worked off her frustration by
attempting to exorcise the underlying impulse. Taking a rubber
stamp with the phrase ‘HAND WEAVING’, she first printed the
words neatly on a blank sheet of paper then followed up with
a volley of less restrained gestures, until the text was virtually
obliterated. The result, which she titled Weaving Word, gave
‘reality to a futile desire … a kind of regret.’14
By starting de novo, Bourgeois overcame the sense of
futility associated with her thwarted desire to weave a cover –
a shelter – for a sleeping infant.15 Manually inserting individual
24
wefts through warps in the simplest plain weave technique,
known as tabby, she produced an array of basic patterns –
checks, stripes and plaids – with a limited palette of three or
four hues. In addition to the regular repeated patterns that are
the hallmark of utilitarian fabric, she created unique designs
of the kind befitting an original artwork. Once its ends were
tucked, forming four neat selvedges, each small weaving was
stitched to at least one, and sometimes several, similarly scaled
manufactured components.16
Bourgeois’s technique can be described as elementary in
two respects. Theoretically at least, rudimentary forms of inter-
lacing may be traced to the earliest nomadic cultures, when,
for example, an impromptu overlaying of leaves, palm fronds or
vines served to make a provisional container to transport eggs,
to trap fish or to create a temporary shelter that fenced and
roofed an enclosure. Her elementary technique may also be
related to pedagogical practices devised to stimulate creative
learning in the young child, a means to encourage self-expres-
sion through play. For the influential educator and inventor of the
kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, manual interlacing was among
the skill sets he identified as ‘gifts’, techniques he considered
foundational to the child’s healthy development.
Merriam-Webster defines a diptych as ‘a work made up
of two matching parts’ – an aggregate, it eschews division in
favour of consonance.17 That the significance of the form was
not lost on Bourgeois is clear from two unusually large exam-
ples, the capstones of this momentous series. In the left panel
of The Woven Child (2007) [p. 165], a black, navy and tan textile
has been created from ribbons whose ends dangle and curl in
a loose tangle. Its edges raw, this ‘fragment’ has been collaged
onto an industrially fabricated white cloth, perhaps table linen.
It is attached to a larger pieced cloth, which comprises the right
panel, in whose lower right corner the artist’s initials have been
embroidered. At its centre is a drawing of a pregnant woman,
the baby visible within her womb. Printed with indigo dyes, the
primordial image appears to soak and stain the fabric support.
Bourgeois had explored the theme of the ‘woven child’ on sev-
eral previous occasions.18 In this iteration she articulated her
deep psychic investment in existential terms, weighing the
maternal figure and the woven fragment – a metonymic sub-
stitute for the tapestry that, to a child, could constitute a haven.
You Are My Polar Star (2009) created the year before
Bourgeois’s death, reprises that investment somewhat differ-
ently. A handsome swatch of rich plaid, made from blue, black,
white and the occasional red strand is matched with a mono-
chrome panel, an expanse of indigo cloth, that, by means of a
light scatter of white ‘drips’, is transformed into a picture: a night
sky. In the late 1930s, when aspiring to become an artist herself,
Bourgeois launched her fledgling art gallery within the confines
of her father’s tapestry business, the Maison Louis Bourgeois. In
this late, great work she speaks eloquently to the determining
if conflicted role that art making had played in her life. Guided
and oriented by that polar star, she charted her singular course.
1 Louise Bourgeois, ‘The Fabric of Construction’, Craft Horizons, vol. XXIX, no. 2
(March/April 1969), p. 31.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 33. Note that of the twenty-eight, only three eschewed some form of
weaving: two were crocheted, the third employed macrame. Though it would be the
LYNNE COOKE
subject of a suite of Mixografia® prints, Crochet I–V, she made in 1998, Bourgeois
never took up the medium of crochet. Hand sewing and needlework were her pre-
ferred techniques.
4 Philip Larratt-Smith, Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 112.
5 In 1958, Bourgeois wrote a note that begins: ‘I do not have to live in an empty world
/ world of vacuum (Marie Bonaparte) I can create / my own artist world of omnipotence
+ fantasy / I have to control space because I cannot / stand emptiness …’ Loose
sheet, 29 January 1958 (LB-0272). I am grateful to Philip Larratt-Smith for bringing
this statement to my attention.
6 ‘I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the
web of the spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’ Louise Bourgeois
in conversation with Cecilia Blomberg, 16 October 1998, and quoted in ‘Spider’, in
Frances Morris, ed., Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. Tate Modern (London, 2007), p. 272.
7 Bourgeois 1969 (see note 1), p. 34. In turn, she associated such ‘flexible architec-
ture’, with the age-old functionality of textiles, whether in the guise of hangings that
serve as protective moveable walls in nomadic cultures or to insulate and decorate
austere stone architecture, as did tapestries in medieval Europe.
8 Bourgeois’s vast corpus of writings, ranging from diary entries, essays, jottings
and interviews to the extensive notes she made between 1952 and 1966 during
which she underwent intensive psychoanalysis, constitutes a hermeneutical seed-
bed and interpretative frame for much of the scholarly and critical literature on her
art and practice.
9 With their familiar ‘timeless’ designs, many of these commonplace fabrics were
likely intended for womenswear or for furnishings, such as curtains, table linen,
handkerchiefs and even mattresses.
10 The association of these matrices with webs is stronger in certain instances
than others, and always far from exclusive; when considered on a grand scale, the
motif evokes stars and constellations, a reference that seems confirmed in a subse-
quent group centered on a cosmic spiral motif.
11 ‘The skeins of wool are a friendly refuge, like a web or a cocoon.’ Louise Bourgeois,
quoted in Jerry Gorovoy and John Cheim, eds., Louise Bourgeois: Drawings (New York
and Paris: Robert Miller Gallery and Daniel Lelong, 1988), p. 138.
12 From the late 1980s through to her death in 2010 printmaking was a frequent
activity for Bourgeois.
13 Louise Bourgeois, in Deborah Wye and Carol Smith, The Prints of Louise
Bourgeois (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 134; reprinted in Wye, ed.,
Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2018), Weaving Word, ca. 1969, cat. no. 1128. As a result of this essay, further
research was done on this impression, and the date has been changed in the online
catalogue raisonné from ca. 1948 to ca. 1969, https://www.moma.org/s/lb/collec
tion_lb/object/object_objid-63370.html (accessed 24 September 2021).
14 Ibid.
15 Compounding the disappointment associated with her later ventures involv-
ing hand weaving was an initiative she had undertaken in the mid-1940s, driven in
large part by a desire to supplement the family income but perhaps also to secure
a measure of personal autonomy as she had not yet established herself profession-
ally as an artist, Bourgeois produced a number of woven fabric swatches intended
for industrial manufacture. Though six of her designs were included in Exhibition of
Modern Textiles, a show intended to boost post-war American production, at MoMA
in 1945, nothing came of it. No companies were prepared to fabricate cloth for fur-
nishings or garments based on her woven samples.
16 On a few occasions, works were comprised of a single handwoven component, as
in Untitled, 2007 [p. 163]. From 1999, Bourgeois employed Mercedes Katz, a seam-
stress and former designer of childrenswear, to assist her with fabric-based works.
17 Merriam-Webster online dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictio-
nary/diptych (accessed 13 September 2021).
18 In 2002, Bourgeois created two sculptures from kitchen strainers in which, like
butterflies, the pieced-fabric infants are captured in a net [one of these can be seen on
p. 55]; and two stuffed fabric sculptures, in which the child rests on the mother’s belly.
In 2003, she produced a cloth book of the kind intended for the youngest of readers,
that contains six woven pictures limning a narrative of genesis and birth [pp. 184–87].
25
The Fabricated Woman Rachel Cusk […] only sewing will restore me to a
balance. everyone approves of my
sewing men women and myself too.1
My memory is moth-eaten
full of holes2
The Woven Child offers an account of femininity that is both a
grappling with the object-status of the female body and a search
for roots. In these works, Louise Bourgeois is the historian of
herself, and thereby also the chronicler of a universal female
anonymity that seeks to acquire identity through the existence
of the body. The artist treats the body as alternately a public
interface and a site of intimate memory, a duality she seeks
to resolve through the memorialising capacity of fabrics and
clothes. This capacity is doubtful, tenuous – yet fabric is the cru-
cial medium in the attempt to find or make female identity. How
else can femininity be recorded, in its secretive administration
of beauty and filth? The female body is fundamentally uncon-
trollable and the possibilities for its adornment are countered
by the requirements to conceal its unacceptability. Bourgeois
here offers a continuum of womanhood that is made possible
specifically by its use of fabric as a medium.
In Bourgeois’s works, the process of femininity, its causes
and the story of its production, lie in the past. The present
moment – since femininity is a manufactured state – is no more
than an outcome. Like any manufactured object the feminine
being is in a sense futureless: her location is in the past, in the
process of her manufacture, and in the events of her object-ex-
istence in the present moment. That existence can be con-
tained, shrouded or hidden, but its essence is permeability and
flux. The artist’s concern is with the intimate experience of time
within these flux states, and with the difficulty of making history
out of them.
When I finally am going to get dressed
what dress will I wear, closets full of
dresses meet my eyes dozens of dresses
on hangers, some are old others dusty
others out of season others are dirty with
stains in the front, unwearable, I start
to panic. What has happened, how could those dozens
of dresses have been neglected to this extent –
but I still like them and I have no intention
to throw them away, nothing will make me throw them
away, they are
my past, it is about my present that I don’t care,
not about my past that I want to understand.3
To achieve the outcome of femininity and exist in the present
moment, the female body is subject to myriad adjustments
that will bring its volcanic interiority in line with perceived real-
ity. These adjustments relate to sanity, are an effort to render
sane that which in fact could momentarily become – or might
already be – insane: that is to say, the biological reality of the
female body in its relationship to civilisation. In its permeability,
Bourgeois perceives the female being as close to horror and
hysteria: the passage of things into and out of the body, its invol-
untary shape-shifting, the periodic growth inside it of another
conscious being, are subject to uncertain processes of mental
accounting. Part of a woman’s manufacture is to learn to regard
and own this traffic as personal and to view her body as contin-
uous with her mind. Yet her will is disabled by the involuntary
nature of her physical processes: she can at best keep pace with
them and acknowledge their reality, or, if she chooses, exult in
them as happenings. Any distraction causes her to fall behind
in her accounting, however, so that the body re-presents itself
to her in its unknowability and capacity for horror. At heart her
relationship to time is a slave relationship.
I cannot get dressed and go out
You cannot get dressed and go out
She or he cannot get dressed and go out
we cannot get dressed and go out
you cannot get dressed and go out
they cannot get dressed and go out
because she is sick or she does not
deserve it – raise your hand. Miss can I
go out –
[…]
If I do not get dressed I cannot go out […]
If I am dirty I do not want to
go out4
Fabrics – clothes and coverings, cloths, rags, dirty laundry –
are fundamental to Bourgeois’s mental accounting and to her
management of the disabling of her female will – to an extent
they are a substitute for will. They are more manufactured than
27
THE FABRICATED WOMAN
she herself is, and she is comforted by their manufactured
nature. Through the medium of clothes and other artefacts of
self-presentation she is given an opportunity to counter-con-
struct herself and exert a form of self-determination. But this
self-construction also creates the possibility – with its atten-
dant hallucinations – of self-dismantling, of experiencing the
body not as an organic whole but as a collection of parts, each
with its own form or style of covering. Through her clothes she
encounters the possibility of her own dismembering, her loss
of centrality and wholeness. Her clothes are like casts of her
body and its experiences: they are scientific, located in time;
they are ultimately alien. In her biological processes – where she
is naked – she experiences a greater loss of identity for having
at other times been clothed. It would be better to be clothed
inside herself, to be made of cloth.
The amoral curiosity of a child’s play with her dolls – and
the fantasy of control within play – becomes possible in the con-
sideration of that cloth-woman. In her fabric works, Bourgeois
is the child at play, arranging and assembling and dismember-
ing her ‘dolls’ and their accessories. Play exists on the border
between virtue and violation, between reality and insanity: it is
a means of rehearsing or confirming reality, and also of exteri-
orising or making concrete the grotesque and fantastical pos-
sibilities of the mind. The child is ‘good’ when she sews or plays,
but she also possesses a secret power of violence, the violence
of creativity. Her hallucinations about herself and others can be
enacted; at the same time, she can lose herself, absorbed in the
action of sewing and making. There is the risk that her naugh-
tiness and freedom will be found out through her immersion in
play, that she will forget that others might be watching.
In Couple III and Couple IV (both 1997) [pp. 40 and 41], two
copulating figures shed identity in the sexual act. They seem
composed of the darkness of night: in sex they are anony­mous,
automatic, though the woman retains a vestigial artificial-
ity by which she can be identified. These figures, like dolls or
maquettes, are in fact projections of the female or childish mind,
a way of envisioning or rehearsing human actions; they mystify
or shroud the will by proposing the action of the body, which in
turn is made incomprehensible by the absence of conscious-
ness. They are contained in a see-through box, a female space,
both imprisoning and exposing.
[…] the dance of the closets and I have found a
place for all the terry cloths:
Untitled, 1996 (detail)
28
RACHEL CUSK
the manias: the terry towels, sanitary bath and
others, in the small closet
with pants and girdles that is it, it is finished the
order is acquired
the content of the closets the arrangements are
symbolic creations!!!!
that is why they change all the time – it is not the
dance of the closets it is the dance of the contained.5
The umbilical cord might be seen as the box’s opposite, an
attachment that is without location: in Do Not Abandon Me
(1999) [p. 45] the cord extends the female doll into a second
doll, the infant. In the play of coupling or mating, the dolls can
simply be suggestively pressed together: copulation or fertili-
sation remain a mystery that can’t be got at, hidden inside the
action of the joined bodies. The mother and infant, by contrast,
are openly awaiting separation: for a moment, joined, the doll
might believe she has been given a doll of her own and that the
insanity and availability of her body are concluded. That fantasy
is extinguished when the cord is cut and the infant is made an
individual being, who now has the potential to abandon her or
become her adversary. Endless Pursuit (2000) [p. 48] expresses
the cyclical futility of the woman’s attempts to relieve her own
aloneness and availability through mating and creating children.
to lie without knowing it seems to have
been my lot ever since the beginning it
is why I always try to convince the
others in order to convince myself
the diseases of the femininity – Try to be
knowledgeable about clothes to prove that
I know everything about sex – clothes means
sex adjusted + fitted […]6
Bourgeois’s writings disclose her preoccupation with mem-
ory and memorialising, and her identification of clothes and
fabrics as the (flimsy) materials of female monument-making.
Clothes are what a woman ‘has’, what contained, imprisoned and
enhanced her; worn-out or stained, they are also records of her.
it gives me great pleasure to hold on to my clothes
my dresses, my stockings, I have never thrown away a pair
of shoes of mine in 20 years […] The pretext
is that they are still good – it’s my past and as
29
THE FABRICATED WOMAN
rotten as it was I would like to take it and
hold it tight in my arms7
[…] my garments and
especially my under garments always have been a
source of intolerable suffering because they
hide an intolerable wound – 8
To deploy more solid and permanent materials is to leave this
intimately female space and join the world of masculine and
monumental values. The scruples of the female artist concern
the validity and consequences of this departure, this abandon-
ment of female powerlessness and its materials, which is also
the abandonment of the child self. Bourgeois resolves some
of this anxiety in her fabric heads, which are a mode of por-
trait-painting: blamelessly observational, they hover somewhere
between the temporal and the commemorative. They are a male
‘form’ rendered in the materials of female disposability. The mar-
ble busts of antiquity, which have survived to look reproachfully
down on the contemporary world, are both evoked and gently
undermined: these fabric heads are humbler, more human and
impermanent. Bourgeois renews her allegiance to the truth of
her female history and its origins in her child self. Size, scale and
the monumental can be arrived at by this route without adopting
male grandiosity and permanence, it can be stitched together
or organically built up, as in her series of tall fabric pillar shapes,
which are both assertive and resolutely handmade.
‘The woven child’ is both maker and made, comforted by
her own industry as by a proximity to – rather than a penetration
of – the sources of her own being. The task of understanding
herself and of divining her own nature is impossible, for at bot-
tom she has been fabricated, and to fabricate in her turn is the
truest action of her autobiographical impulse.
Each garment has a
history, a past, a raison-d’être
behind each garment there is a
person not me […]9
The unraveling of a torment: you have to
begin somewhere: the color blue, the
damage is repairable. I cannot throw
it away because I do not want to
put it on the back burner. It is worth
30
RACHEL CUSK
saving. I have gone through this one
hundred times + any piece of tapestry is
worth (not saving, cherishing) […] I cannot renounce
the past. I cannot and do not want to forget it.10
Her origins are not refuted or rejected: she turns away from
self-loathing, choosing instead to confirm and venerate habit,
repetition and female craft. Bourgeois’s fabric ‘pictures’ and col-
lages, colourful and kaleidoscopic, are the joyful abstractions of
her psyche, imageless, recording and analysing nothing. They are
a non-narrative, a diagrammatic emanation, in the way that the
patterns of nature are emanations. The possibility of disgust – of a
lifelong female shame that has likewise been recorded by fabrics
– is soothed and supplanted by the sanity of sewing and mak-
ing, which in turn becomes the fundamental agency of the artist.
Bourgeois’s achievement in her fabric works is a sustained feat
of non-betrayal, the fidelity to herself and to her origins remain
unbroken in the act of representation. Importantly, she resists
the temptation to treat the female self as categorically ‘other’, as
comprising everything that is inadmissible and that lies outside
public reality. She makes her passage through the intimate terrain
of private and chaotic experience without being destabilised by
its violent emotion. Her triumph lies in the retaining of artistic
objectivity in the face of the most fiercely subjective materials.
the cloth or tampon clogs the plumbing
the terry cloth that lies around somebody has her
period the towel lies around. I had the desire to
make a bedspread
of sewn terry cloths, I can free myself from this
desire; I do not need to make this
bedspread; I can do better. If one knew whyy one
Ode à l’Oubli, 2007 (detail)
makes an oeuvre one would not
make it.11
1 All quotes from Louise Bourgeois’s writings. Loose sheet, 28 May 1963 (LB-0313).
2 Loose sheet, 21 June 1994 (LB-0551).
3 Loose sheet, 1967 (LB-0106).
4 Loose sheet, ca. 1961 (LB-0103).
5 Loose sheet, ca. 1995 (LB-0107)
6 Loose sheet, ca. 1965 (LB-0331).
7 Loose sheet, ca. 1963 (LB-0202).
8 Loose sheet, 2 January 1961 (LB-0053).
9 Loose sheet, ca. 1995 (LB-0782).
10 Diary entry, 6 June 1994.
11 Loose sheet, ca. 1995 (LB-0107).
31
Acts of Reparation: Spiders, Needles and Cells
in the Work of Louise Bourgeois
Julienne Lorz My mother would sit out in the sun and
repair a tapestry or a petit point.
She really loved it. This sense of reparation
is very deep within me.1
Louise Bourgeois grew up with tapestries. Her parents ran an
antique tapestry gallery on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris
while also managing a tapestry restoration atelier, first in the
Parisian suburb of Choisy-le-Roi and later in the suburb of
Antony. While her mother, Joséphine Fauriaux Bourgeois, over-
saw a team of tapestry workers and executed repairs in the
suburbs, her father, Louis Bourgeois, sold the tapestries in the
gallery in the city.2 Since the tapestry restoration business was
also the site of the family home, Louise Bourgeois witnessed
these activities from an early age, and even became involved
with them, helping to draw in missing elements – often the feet
– on figures in damaged tapestries.3
That her childhood experiences in the family atelier,
and moreover tapestries, fabrics and clothing, would one day
become of major importance in Louise Bourgeois’s oeuvre was
not immediately apparent when she started out as an artist in
the late 1930s. There were however early hints at what was to
come. For what is continually fascinating about Bourgeois’s
artworks, over the course of seven decades of creation, is the
way in which her motifs, ideas, forms and materials are revisited
and reused, resulting in an extensive web of associations that
relate not only to her biography, but also to broader, universal
themes such as reparation and the complexity of human rela-
tionships.4 The spider – a key motif in Bourgeois’s work – is a
case in point. Bourgeois associates this creature – a tireless
weaver and repairer – with her mother. In the text for Ode à Ma
Mère (1995), a book of nine dry points, each depicting arachnids,
Bourgeois writes poetically about her mother and their relation-
ship, and why she thinks of her as a spider:
The friend (l’araignée – pourquoi l’araignée?)
parce que my best friend was my mother and she
was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable,
dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as
an araignée.5
Two ink and charcoal drawings from 1947 represent the earliest
appearances of the spider in Bourgeois’s work. The drawings
are figurative and expressive, even childlike. The spider appears
again in an engraving made the following year, titled Araignée.
This time its form is abstracted, exaggeratedly multi-legged
and closely recalls the tall, spindly-legged buildings found in
Bourgeois’s portfolio of nine engravings, He Disappeared into
Complete Silence (1947). It is unclear whether, at this time,
Bourgeois had made the connection between her mother and the
spider.6 After these early works, she does not return to the motif
until 1994, when she began a series of steel sculptures, all titled
Spider, as well as a multi-spider work titled The Nest, and several
spider drawings. Additional sculptures and works on paper, such
as the aforementioned Ode à Ma Mère, soon followed.
In a 1998 interview, Bourgeois discussed the notion of
her mother as a spider in the broader context of reparation: ‘I
came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you
bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves
and repairs it.’7 Bourgeois considered the act of reparation as
symbolic of the psychological impulse to make amends. Her
lead wall relief Repairs in the Sky (1999) [p. 196] points to the
Sisyphean labour of attempting to repair the irreparable. In this
work, a series of holes resembling eyes or mouths are partly
stuffed with bits of blue cloth and jaggedly sewn with blue
thread. In a smaller work, Mending (1989) [p. 190], an irregu-
larly shaped hole in a yellow piece of paper is ‘repaired’ with
a small piece of blue paper roughly stitched to it with black
thread, forming a mismatched ring around the hole. Rather than
fixing the tear seamlessly, this ‘repair’ frames and emphasises
the damage in the paper. It is the exact opposite of the kind of
‘invisible mending’ practiced by tailors, dressmakers or resto-
ration workshops, such as the one Bourgeois worked in as a
child. In reference to a similarly constructed piece, Reparation
(1989), Bourgeois wrote:
Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole … you have
to hide the damage … you have to hide the urge to do
damage. There is a background of drama here … that
something bad you have done must be undone. I sew
… I do what I can. This goes back to my mother … she
repaired things … she repaired everything. But there
is a limit to that. When you mend things, it allows you
to have your hands occupied, to look intensely, and
never meet the eyes of other people. You can even
be moral about it … you can appear to do things for
others … you can say, ‘I am repairing your clothes’.8
33
ACTS OF REPARATION JULIENNE LORZ

Sewing, for Bourgeois, goes beyond restoration on a material In appearance as well as thematically, Needle (Fuseau) has
level. Instead, it is a metaphor for psychological repair and for a close relationship with other works created the same year,
exploring the complexity of human relationships. In her art- including the free-standing In Respite (1992) [p. 121], a sculp-
works, ‘repairs’ remain visible, becoming conspicuous scars. ture that features an elongated pink rubber form pierced by
Sewing becomes a subtle form of communication and an sewing needles. Black thread passes through these needles
attempt at atonement, where the gesture and labour involved and connects to spindles and spools of different sizes; these
can evoke complex feelings – among them guilt and gratitude sit at the ends of metal arms resembling the branches of a tree.
– in another person. For Bourgeois, the act of reparation was a Both Needle (Fuseau) and In Respite coincide with Bourgeois’s
defence against fragmentation and disintegration, and sewing first large-scale spatial environments: the beginning of her Cell
a way to ward off feelings of abandonment or separation – an series. It is a time of heightened creativity for the artist, already
attempt to keep things whole. in her eighties, and comes a decade after moving to a larger
In Bourgeois’s work, symbolic associations with the nee- studio (a former sewing factory for blue jeans), and her retro-
dle – the tool most closely related to this psychological and spective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.11
practical task – are just as complex. As critic Paulo Herkenhoff In Bourgeois’s Cells, various thematic threads, present in previ-
has written, the needle is ‘an instrument of labour’ and ‘a ther- ous individual works, are reiterated within a confined space and
apeutic device, a cure for guilt and a tool for craft’.9 Bourgeois’s
amplification of the dimensions of a typically curved tapestry
needle to human scale in her sculpture Needle (Fuseau) (1992)
[p. 120] transforms this ordinary, everyday item into something
closer to an object of worship, demanding – at the very least
– our attention and respect. Despite the needle’s potentially
nightmarish magnification, its sharp point is rendered harmless
and its lower curvature stabilized by a metal stand. Positioned
on either side of the needle are two large wooden spheres.
When contemplating the work from the front, the sculp-
ture loosely resembles Bourgeois’s phallic sculpture Fillette
(Sweeter Version) (1968–89). Should the needle be read, then,
as a needle-thin phallus standing precariously in the balance,
a tribute to the craft of sewing or as an exaggerated emblem of
repair and regeneration; a celebration of joining things together,
rather than severing, cutting or breaking apart? Like many of
Bourgeois’s works, it is resolutely ambiguous, not least in its
relation to the body: the two wooden spheres might also be
read as breasts, the flax the long, blonde hair of a woman. An
ordinary-sized tapestry needle appears alongside other nee-
dles in Bourgeois’s small, hand-sized sculpture Femme Pieu
(ca. 1970), which critic and curator Lucy Lippard describes as
‘a headless, armless, legless, helpless woman as a pincushion,
lying on her back like an upended turtle’.10 Crammed together
in a brutal jumble with bits of thread, the needles – some stuck
into the wax – are placed where the genitals might otherwise
be in relation to two breast-like mounds. The needles here – far
less serene than the enigmatic Needle (Fuseau) – suggest a
visceral, even savage sexuality.
Spider, 1947
Ode à Ma Mère, 1995

34 35
ACTS OF REPARATION
explored with greater intensity. ‘When I began building the Cells’,
the artist stated, ‘I wanted to create my own architecture, and
not depend on the museum space, not have to adapt my scale
to it. I wanted to constitute a real space which you could enter
and walk around in.’12
In one of these Cells, titled Spider (1997) [pp. 109–13], sev-
eral key motifs and concerns are brought together. The spider is
architectural in scale: its body merges with the roof of the mesh
cage of the Cell, while each of its skilfully articulated, sinewy
steel legs extend beyond it.13 In critic and theorist Mieke Bal’s
words, the enormous legs become ‘a skeleton of the house’ and
‘having become architectural in size, they become architectural
in essence: the body is a building.’14 In Spider, the arachnid’s
body appears to be in possession of – or protecting – the Cell’s
contents, the focus of which is a low empty chair covered with
a worn piece of tapestry. Other tapestry fragments – some
featuring body parts including feet, as well as a nude cherub
Femme Pieu, ca. 1970
figure with its genitals snipped out – partially cover the Cell
walls, while an elongated black rubber sculpture hangs from
an inside wall, acting as a pincushion for large needles and a
safety pin holding coins and other lucky charms. Suspended
from the ceiling are chains with various trinkets attached: a
pocket watch, locket, medal and a bottle of Shalimar perfume.
The spider’s body, filled with glass eggs, extends through the
centre of the Cell’s roof. In Spider, Bourgeois conjures a dra-
matic scenario inflected with and enlivened by autobiographical
references, specifically to her mother, the ‘useful spider’ and
careful restorer of damaged tapestries.
In a later Cell, Lady in Waiting (2003) [pp. 115–17],
Bourgeois addresses similar themes, albeit with a different
emphasis. Within this work’s claustrophobic structure, a tap-
estry-covered armchair sits squarely on a wooden floor. A doll-
sized armless female figure made out of the same fabric as
the chair sits facing the window. Emerging from her belly are
needle-like spider’s legs made of steel, while from her mouth
spew differently sized and coloured threads that hover almost
invisibly in the air, reaching across to five spools neatly displayed
in the front windowpane.15 Thanks to the matching fabrics of
both chair and figure this woman-spider is inconspicuous and
camouflaged. ‘Lady-in-waiting’ is the term for a personal ser-
vant, a woman whose role it is to exist solely in the background.
This solitary figure appears to be literally waiting, anticipating an
event that will never happen, engrossed in weaving a web that
will never be completed. In a diary entry written nearly a decade
Spider, 1997 (detail)
36
JULIENNE LORZ
before Lady in Waiting was constructed, Bourgeois identifies 10 Lucy Lippard, ‘Femme Pieu c. 1970’, in Morris 2007, p. 142. Femme Pieu can be
translated as Stake Woman.
herself with this ‘invincible’ spider – a ‘lady in waiting’, steely 11 Jerry Gorovoy, ‘Kate Fowle and Jerry Gorovoy in Conversation’, in Julienne Lorz,
and resolute, actively biding her time: ed., Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence; The Cells (Munich: Prestel, 2015), p. 40.
12 Louise Bourgeois, ‘Red Rooms’, in Marie-Laure Bernadac, ed., Louise Bourgeois:
Oeuvres récentes / Recent Works, exh. cat. Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux;
Lady in waiting is Centro cultural de Belém; Malmö Konsthall; Serpentine Gallery (Bordeaux and
almost invincible London, 1997), p. 38.
13 Only two years later Bourgeois created her most monumental spider, the thirty-­
she’s also peaceful foot Maman (1999). See Mählmann 2018 (see note 6) for a detailed analysis of the
and isn’t going to spider in Bourgeois’s oeuvre.
14 Mieke Bal, ‘Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’s “Spider” as Theoretical
bother anyone – I am Object’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (1999), p. 104.
happy to be, this breathing spider.16 15 For Bourgeois, these five threads symbolised the fact that she grew up within a
family of five and formed her own family of five with her husband Robert Goldwater.
My thanks to The Easton Foundation for this insight.
Over the course of her seven-decade-long career, Bourgeois 16 Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, February 1994 (‘February Memos’).
continuously wove elements of her own biography – and her
own physical and psychological experiences – into her artworks.
These threads are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the
late fabric works, which draw on and explore her relationship
with her mother, her experience of vulnerability, of ageing, and
her attitude to and intimacy with a wide range of materials, pro-
cesses, tools and techniques. In these late works, as in her career
more broadly, however, these biographical threads are always
part of a richer tapestry. Even in her most intimate and personal
works, she skilfully widens the focus, leaving space for multiple
interpretations, individual to each beholder, resulting in a subtle
and complex web that continues to surprise us to this day.
1 Louise Bourgeois, ‘Self-Expression Is Sacred and Fatal: Statements’, in Christiane
Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann Verlag,
1992), p. 187.
2 Joséphine Fauriaux Bourgeois came from a tapestry family in Aubusson, as
Louise Bourgeois recounts in ‘A Memoir: Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Beckert’
(late 1970s), in Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the
Father: Writings and Interviews 1923–1997, eds. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans
Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998), pp. 117–22.
3 Ibid., pp. 118–19.
4 Deborah Wye has noted that ‘[i]t is not at all unusual for Bourgeois to come
across an artwork made fifty years before, recognize in it emotions that are still vivid,
and resume working as if not a day had passed.’ Wye, ‘The Drama of the Self: Louise
Bourgeois as Printmaker’, in Wye and Carol Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 17.
5 Text from Ode à Ma Mère, cited in Bourgeois 1998 (see note 2), pp. 326–29.
6 Antje-Britt Mählmann, The Secret of the Spiders: Work Strategies and Viewer
Effect in the Late Work of Louise Bourgeois (Weimar: VDG - Verlag und Datenbank
für Geisteswissenschaften, 2018), p. 26.
7 Louise Bourgeois in an interview with Cecilia Blomberg, 16 October 1998, and
quoted in ‘Spider’, in Frances Morris, ed., Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. Tate Modern
(London, 2007), p. 272.
8 Louise Bourgeois quoted in Wye and Smith 1994 (see note 4), p. 161. Reparation
was later produced in lithograph, thread and collage as a limited edition for Parkett
Publishers in 1991.
9 Paulo Herkenhoff, ‘Needles’, in Morris 2007 (see note 7), p. 186.
37
‘ … the relation of one person to his surroundings is a
continuing preoccupation. It can be casual or close; simple
or involved; subtle or blunt. It can be painful or pleasant.
Most of all it can be real or imaginary. This is the soil from
which all my work grows.’2

Single I, 1996 39
40 Couple III, 1997 Couple IV, 1997 41
42 High Heels, 1998 43
44 Do Not Abandon Me, 1999
46 Temper Tantrum, 2000 Untitled, 1999 47
48 Endless Pursuit, 2000 Hysterical, 2001 49
50 Couple, 2001
52 Legs, 2001
54 The Woven Child, 2002 55
56 Knife Figure, 2002 Untitled, 2002 57
58 The Reticent Child, 2003
62 Spiral Woman, 2003
64 The Good Mother, 2003
66 Arch of Hysteria, 2004
68 Untitled, 2004
‘I have a strong impulse to make a figure [...]
on the workbench in a material soft like a woven material the word
mattress came to mind from material no doubt. and to wrap up
said figure in string. The roasted filets of my youth were wrapped in string

This figure I feel myself drawn to make is going to dissolve or appease

my anxiety … ’3

Untitled, 1996 71
72 Untitled, 1998 Femme Maison, 2001 73
74 Femme, 2005 The Found Child, 2001 75
‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the
devastating effect of the emotions you go through.’4

Fallen Woman, 1981–96 77

78 Pierre, 1998 Untitled, 1998 79
80 Rejection, 2001 The Mute, 2002 81
82 Untitled, 2002
84 Untitled, 2002 Untitled, 2003 85
86 Untitled, 2006
88 Together, 2005
90 Untitled, 2009 Untitled, 2009 91
‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is
precisely a plea in favor of a
second chance, it is a plea in favor of
x and against y’5

Cell VII, 1998 93

96 Cell XXI (Portrait), 2000
98 Cell XXII (Portrait), 2000
100 Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001
102
104 Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001
106 Cell XXVIII (Portrait), 2004–05
108 Spider, 1997
114 Lady in Waiting, 2003
‘ … you can retell your life and remember your life
by the shape, the weight, the color, the smell of the
clothes in your closet. Fashion is like the weather,
the ocean – it changes all the time.’6

Untitled, 1996 119

120 Needle (Fuseau), 1992 In Respite, 1992 121
122 Untitled, 1996
124 Untitled, 1996
126 Untitled, 1998 Echo I, 2007 127
‘In the mathematical world and in the world
of Morals (Pascal) the impossible is possible.
and also in the world of logic – the premise is your choice
A world where bereavement does not exist because
there is nothing which one can mourn. it is a world
that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it
myself. I am the author of my own world
with its internal logic and with its value that no one
can deny.’7

Untitled, 2000 129

130 Untitled, 2001
132 The Cold of Anxiety, 2001
134 Untitled, 2002
136 Untitled, 2005 Untitled, 2005 137
‘ … method of comparison of check of test
of cross-checking of small things.
How are you going to dress, in the sadness and
modesty of black, in the youthful and triumphant
white, in your blue and vivid red-orange
This stream of consciousness, like a
river always itself and always different
such particles, such little colors
a few little pebbles, a few grains of
sand, a few bits of mud, a few branches, a few
flowers, a few fish today warm
yesterday icy and tomorrow fresh
You must recognize what you have already seen
to get used to it, to use it as best you can.’8

Untitled, 2005 139

140 Untitled, 2007 141
142 Conscious and Unconscious, 2008
144 Untitled, 2010 145
‘I would like to embroider +
put everything in place and in a
proper + predictable manner –
to simplify, reduce organize
round up and retire after
being sure of the method. drawn
in and concentric I would like
to be.’9

Untitled, 2003 149

150 Untitled, 2005 Untitled, 2005 151
152 Untitled, 2005
154 Untitled, 2006
156 Untitled, 2006 Untitled, 2006 157
158 Untitled, 2006 Untitled, 2006 159
160 Untitled, 2006
162 Untitled, 2007 163
164 Untitled, 2007 The Woven Child, 2007 165
166 Eternity, 2009
‘I spent my life making openwork
pulling threads for the bed sheets
and the tablecloths I spent my life
making a trousseau for myself, me who has
never been trussed, a little humor
please, no pity which would be
inappropriate and
dumb – I am not dumb, I am seamstress.
simply unhappy – fearful idiotic washerwoman
I
spent my
life washing the floor cloth.
socks and handkerchiefs’10

Ode à la Bièvre, 2007 169

170 171
172 Eugénie Grandet, 2009
174 175
176 Ode à l’Oubli, 2004
178 179
180 The Fragile, 2007
182 183
184 The Woven Child, 2003 185
186 187
‘If I’m in a positive mood I’m interested in joining. If I’m
in a negative mood I will cut things.’11

‘ … my mother was a restorer, she repaired broken

things. I don’t do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the
straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again.’12

Spit or Star, 1986 189

190 Mending, 1989 Untitled, 1996 191
192 Untitled, 1998 Needle, 1998 193
‘When I was growing up, all the women in my house
were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination
with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The
needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to
forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’13

Untitled (Leg and Jewelry), 1996 195

196 Repairs in the Sky, 1999 The Trauma Colors, 1999 197
198 Do Not Abandon Me, 2000 Umbilical Cord, 2000 199
List of Exhibited Works All dimensions are given in centi- Untitled, 1996 Cell VII, 1998 Do Not Abandon Me, 1999 Temper Tantrum, 2000 Hysterical, 2001 The Woven Child, 2002
metres, and are height × width × Cloth, bone and steel Metal, glass, fabric, bronze, steel, Fabric Fabric Fabric and stainless steel Fabric, steel and aluminium
depth, unless otherwise stated. 300.4 × 208.3 × 195.6 wood, bones, wax and thread 12.1 × 52.1 × 21.6 22.9 × 33 × 50.8 45.7 × 20.3 × 15.9 23.5 × 20.3 × 20.3
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, 207 × 221 × 210.8 Ursula Hauser Collection, Private collection. Courtesy Collection The Easton Private collection, New York
Fallen Woman, 1981–96 Maryland Private collection. Courtesy Switzerland Hauser & Wirth Collection Foundation, New York p. 55
White marble and nylon p. 119 Hauser & Wirth Collection Services p. 45 Services p. 49
8.3 × 12.7 × 8.3 pp. 93–95 p. 46 Untitled, 2002
Private collection, New York Untitled, 1996 Repairs in the Sky, 1999 Legs, 2001 Fabric and steel
p. 77 Bronze, cloth and steel High Heels, 1998 Lead, steel, fabric and thread Umbilical Cord, 2000 Fabric 27.3 × 12.7 × 10.2
293.4 × 109.2 × 88.9 Fabric and steel 45.7 × 66 × 1.6 Engraving and dry point on cloth 193 × 86.4 × 57.2 Collection The Easton
Spit or Star, 1986 Private collection, New York 35.6 × 74.9 × 20.3 Private collection, New York 40.6 × 36.8 Private collection Foundation, New York
Watercolour and pencil on paper p. 123 Private collection. Courtesy p. 196 Collection The Easton p. 53 p. 57
60.3 × 48.3 Hauser & Wirth Foundation, New York
Private collection, New York Untitled, 1996 pp. 42–43 The Trauma Colors, 1999 p. 199 Rejection, 2001 Untitled, 2002
p. 189 Cloth, wood and steel Lead, steel and fabric Fabric, steel, wood and lead Needlepoint and aluminium
258.4 × 274.3 × 162.6 Needle, 1998 71.8 × 56.5 × 7.6 Untitled, 2000 63.5 × 33 × 30.5 43.2 × 30.5 × 30.5
Mending, 1989 Ursula Hauser Collection, Pencil, red ink and white-out Private collection Fabric and stainless steel Collection John Cheim, New York Glenstone Museum, Potomac,
Blue paper, thread and pencil on Switzerland on paper p. 197 154.9 × 30.5 × 30.5 p. 80 Maryland
paper p. 125 22.9 × 30.5 Private collection, New York p. 83
27 × 25.4 Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Untitled, 1999 p. 129 The Cold of Anxiety, 2001
Collection The Easton Untitled, 1996 p. 193 Fabric, wood and metal Fabric and steel Untitled, 2002
Foundation, New York Red ink on paper 64.8 × 20.3 × 30.5 Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001 208.3 × 30.5 × 25.4 Tapestry and aluminium
p. 190 30.2 × 22.9 Pierre, 1998 Private collection, New York Steel, stainless steel, glass, Private collection, New York 45.7 × 30.5 × 30.5
Collection The Easton Fabric p. 47 mirror, wood and fabric pp. 132–33 Collection The Easton
In Respite, 1992 Foundation, New York 22.2 × 14.6 × 14.6 177.8 × 106.7 × 106.7 Foundation, New York
Steel, thread and pigmented p. 191 Private collection, Switzerland Cell XXI (Portrait), 2000 Collection The Easton The Found Child, 2001 p. 84
rubber p. 78 Steel, fabric, wood and glass Foundation, New York Fabric
328.9 × 81.3 × 71.1 Untitled (Leg and Jewelry), 1996 177.8 × 114.3 × 114.3 pp. 101–03 30.5 × 68.6 × 40.6 Untitled, 2002
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel Mixed media sewn on fabric Untitled, 1998 Collection The Easton Collection The Easton Tapestry and stainless steel
p. 121 handkerchief Fabric and steel Foundation, New York Cell XXV (The View of the World Foundation, New York 189.2 × 38.1 × 30.5
31.1 × 31.8 25.4 × 64.8 × 45.7 p. 97 of the Jealous Wife), 2001 p. 75 Collection The Easton
Needle (Fuseau), 1992 Private collection, New York D.Daskalopoulos Collection Steel, wood, marble, glass Foundation, New York
Steel, flax, mirror and wood p. 195 p. 72 Cell XXII (Portrait), 2000 and fabric Untitled, 2001 pp. 134–35
276.9 × 256.5 × 142.2 Steel, fabric, wood and glass 254 × 304.8 × 304.8 Fabric and stainless steel
Collection The Easton Couple III, 1997 Untitled, 1998 177.8 × 109.2 × 109.2 Holma/Ellipse Collection, 227.3 × 38.1 × 30.5 Lady in Waiting, 2003
Foundation, New York Fabric, leather, steel arm brace, Fabric and stainless steel Ursula Hauser Collection, Portugal Collection The Easton Tapestry, thread, stainless steel,
p. 120 wood and glass 50.8 × 30.5 × 33 Switzerland pp. 104–05 Foundation, New York steel, wood and glass
71.1 × 180.3 × 99.1 Private collection, New York pp. 98–99 p. 131 208.3 × 110.5 × 147.3
Single I, 1996 Collection The Easton p. 79 Couple, 2001 Glenstone Museum, Potomac,
Fabric Foundation, New York Do Not Abandon Me, 2000 Fabric Knife Figure, 2002 Maryland
213.4 × 132.1 × 40.6 p. 40 Untitled, 1998 Dry point on cloth 48.3 × 15.2 × 16.5 Fabric, steel and wood pp. 115–17
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Fabric and steel 44.5 × 44.5 Collection The Easton 22.2 × 76.2 × 19.1
Maryland Couple IV, 1997 126.4 × 30.5 × 30.5 Collection The Easton Foundation, New York Collection The Easton Spiral Woman, 2003
p. 39 Fabric, leather, stainless steel, Private collection. Courtesy Foundation, New York p. 51 Foundation, New York Fabric
plastic, wood and glass Hauser & Wirth Collection Services p. 198 p. 56 175.3 × 35.6 × 34.3
Untitled, 1996 50.8 × 165.1 × 77.5 p. 126 Femme Maison, 2001 Ursula Hauser Collection,
Fabric Collection The Easton Endless Pursuit, 2000 Fabric and steel The Mute, 2002 Switzerland
25.4 × 52.1 × 29.2 Foundation, New York Untitled, 1998 Fabric 35.6 × 38.1 × 66 Fabric and aluminium p. 63
The Brotmann Family Collection, p. 41 Red ink, pencil and white-out 45.7 × 30.5 × 30.5 Collection The Easton 35.6 × 30.5 × 30.5
Belgium. Courtesy Cheim & Read, on paper Ursula Hauser Collection, Foundation, New York Private collection, Switzerland The Good Mother, 2003
New York Spider, 1997 22.9 × 29.2 Switzerland p. 73 p. 81 Fabric, thread, stainless steel,
p. 71 Steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, Collection The Easton p. 48 wood and glass
rubber, silver, gold and bone Foundation, New York 196.9 × 106.7 × 86.4
449.6 × 665.5 × 518.2 p. 192 Collection The Easton
Collection The Easton Foundation, New York
Foundation, New York pp. 64–65
pp. 109–13

200 201
The Reticent Child, 2003 Femme, 2005 Untitled, 2006 Ode à la Bièvre, 2007 Eternity, 2009 List of Illustrated Works Ewa Jaroszyńska, Cocoons 1, 1967 Louise Bourgeois, Femme Pieu,
Fabric, marble, stainless steel Tapestry Fabric and stainless steel Fabric, digital print and Digital print, dry point and Sisal and hemp, crochet ca. 1970
and aluminium 14 × 27.9 × 16.5 27.3 × 30.5 × 30.5 screenprint book, 25 pages embroidery on cloth 69.9 × 50.2 × 29.2 Wax, metal pins and thread
182.9 × 284.5 × 91.4 Collection The Easton Collection The Easton 29.2 × 38.1 (each page) 314.3 × 217.8 p. 21 8.9 × 6.4 × 15.2
Collection The Easton Foundation, New York Foundation, New York Collection The Easton Private collection, New York Collection Museum of Fine Arts,
Foundation, New York p. 74 p. 87 Foundation, New York p. 167 Louise Bourgeois, La Mère a Santa Fe, New Mexico
pp. 58–61 pp. 169–71 Couper le Cordon, 1986 p. 36
Together, 2005 Untitled, 2006 Eugénie Grandet, 2009 Ink and charcoal on blue paper
The Woven Child, 2003 Fabric and stainless steel Fabric The Fragile, 2007 Mixed media on cloth, 27.9 × 21.6
Fabric and lithograph book, 38.1 × 50.8 × 61 38.7 × 48.6 Digital prints and screenprints suite of 16 Collection Artist Rooms
six pages Private collection, New York Private collection on cloth with hand painted 30.5 × 21.6 × 1.9 (each) Foundation, United Kingdom
28.6 × 22.9 × 5.1 pp. 88–89 pp. 154–55 additions, suite of 36 Collection The Easton p. 22
Private collection, Florida 29.2 × 24.1 (each) Foundation, New York
pp. 184–87 Untitled, 2005 Untitled, 2006 Private collection, New York pp. 173–75 Louise Bourgeois, Weaving Word,
Fabric and stainless steel Fabric pp. 181–83 ca. 1969
Untitled, 2003 172.1 × 30.5 × 30.5 121.9 × 152.4 Untitled, 2009 Only state. Rubber stamp on
Needlepoint, fabric and wood Private collection, New York Ursula Hauser Collection, The Woven Child, 2007 Fabric and wood paper, composition: 11.3 × 10.9;
68.6 × 36.8 × 43.2 p. 136 Switzerland Woven fabric and digital 44.5 × 27.9 × 24.1 sheet: 16.9 × 25.1
Collection The Easton p. 156 print on cloth, one of three Collection The Easton Collection The Museum of
Foundation, New York Untitled, 2005 unique variants Foundation, New York Modern Art, New York
p. 85 Fabric and stainless steel Untitled, 2006 128.3 × 157.5 × 6.4 p. 90 Gift of the artist. Inv. 163.1990
188 × 33 × 35.6 Fabric and fabric collage Collection The Easton p. 23 (top)
Untitled, 2003 Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, 27.9 × 46.4 × 5.1 Foundation, New York Untitled, 2009
Woven fabric The Netherlands Private collection, Norway. p. 165 Fabric and aluminium Louise Bourgeois, Weaving, 2001
43.2 × 52.1 p. 137 Courtesy of Peder Lund 47 × 35.6 × 35.6 Only state, variant. Fabric
Collection The Easton p. 157 Untitled, 2007 Collection The Easton stamping, plate: 27.8 × 21.5;
Foundation, New York Untitled, 2005 Fabric, rubber, thread, stainless Foundation, New York sheet: 39 × 28
p. 149 Fabric, thread, rubber, stainless Untitled, 2006 steel, wood and glass p. 91 Collection The Museum of
steel, wood and glass Fabric and fabric collage 193 × 208.2 × 101.6 Modern Art, New York
Arch of Hysteria, 2004 241.3 × 200.7 × 109.2 74.9 × 106 Private collection. Courtesy Untitled, 2010 Gift of the artist. Inv. 1554.2008
Fabric Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Private collection, New York Hauser & Wirth Collection Fabric, thread, rubber, stainless p. 23 (bottom)
21.6 × 53.3 × 12.1 Humlebeak, Denmark. Acquired p. 158 Services steel, wood and glass
Private collection, New York with support from The New pp. 140–41 199.4 × 221 × 110.5 Louise Bourgeois, You Are My
pp. 66–67 Carlsberg Foundation and the Untitled, 2006 Private collection Polar Star, 2009
Louisiana Foundation Fabric and fabric collage Untitled, 2007 pp. 145–47 Woven fabric and digital print
Cell XXVIII (Portrait), 2004–05 p. 139 69.2 × 94.6 Fabric and fabric collage on cloth
Fabric, steel, glass, stainless steel Private collection. Courtesy 41.9 × 31.8 × 4.4 85.7 × 118.1
and wood Untitled, 2005 Hauser & Wirth Collection Collection The Easton Private collection, New York
193 × 127 × 127 Fabric Services Foundation, New York p. 24
Collection The Easton 41.3 × 54 p. 159 p. 163
Foundation, New York Collection The Easton Louise Bourgeois, Ode à Ma
pp. 106–107 Foundation, New York Untitled, 2006 Untitled, 2007 Mère, 1995
p. 150 Fabric, fabric collage and Fabric Illustrated book with
Ode à l’Oubli, 2004 embroidered text 54.6 × 74.9 nine dry points
Fabric and lithograph book, Untitled, 2005 173.4 × 99.1 Private collection, New York 30.5 × 30.5 (each)
36 pages Fabric Collection The Easton p. 164 Private collection, New York
27.3 × 33.7 × 5.1 (each page) 40.6 × 53.3 Foundation, New York p. 34
Collection The Easton Ursula Hauser Collection, p. 161 Conscious and Unconscious,
Foundation, New York Switzerland 2008 Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1947
pp. 177–79 p. 151 Echo I, 2007 Fabric, rubber, thread, stainless Ink and charcoal on tan paper
Bronze (painted white) and steel steel, wood and glass 29.2 × 22.2
Untitled, 2004 Untitled, 2005 193 × 43.2 × 35.6 224.8 × 167.6 × 94 Private collection, New York
Fabric and stainless steel Fabric Private collection, New York Collection The Easton p. 35
48.3 × 30.5 × 30.5 35.6 × 45.7 p. 127 Foundation, New York
Private collection, New York Ringier Collection, Switzerland p. 143
p. 69 pp. 152–53

202 203
Author Biographies Lynne Cooke is senior curator
of special projects in modern
art at the National Gallery of
Art, Washington DC. She was
previously curator at the Dia Art
Foundation, New York (1991–
2008) and chief curator at the
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía, Madrid (2008–12).
She has published widely on
contemporary art, including texts
on Agnes Martin, Zoe Leonard,
Igshaan Adams and James
Castle. She is currently work-
ing on the exhibition Braided
Histories: Modernist Abstraction
and Woven Forms, opening in
autumn 2023.
Rachel Cusk is the author of the
Outline trilogy (2014–18), the
memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and
Aftermath (2012), and several
other works of fiction and non-­
fiction. She is a Guggenheim
fellow. She lives in Paris. Her
most recent novel is Second
Place (2021).
Julienne Lorz has a background
in contemporary dance. From
2008 to 2017 she curated and
co-curated several international
projects, monographic and
thematic exhibitions at the Haus
der Kunst in Munich, including
the exhibition Louise Bourgeois:
Structures of Existence; The Cells
(2015). From 2018 to 2021 she
was chief curator at the Gropius
Bau in Berlin. She is currently
professor of MA Expanded
Museum Studies at the University
of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Ralph Rugoff OBE has been
Director of the Hayward Gallery
in London since May 2006.
He was Artistic Director of the
2019 Biennale di Venezia 58th
International Art Exhibition
and the Artistic Director of the
XIII Biennale de Lyon in 2015.
204
Acknowledgements We are grateful to the following
individuals and organisations for
their collaboration and support:
Hauser & Wirth Collection Services
The Easton Foundation:
Jerry Gorovoy; Maggie Wright;
Philip Larratt-Smith; Sewon
Kang; Hera HaeSoo Kim
Louise Bourgeois Studio:
Kendal Grady; Cait Schuyler;
Richard Bruce; Beth Higgins;
Johee Kim
Lenders
Collection John Cheim
D.Daskalopoulos Collection
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Glenstone Foundation
Holma/Ellipse Collection
Louise Bourgeois Trust
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar,
The Netherlands
Ringier Collection, Switzerland
The Brotmann Family Collection
The Easton Foundation
Ursula Hauser Collection,
Switzerland
And those who wish to
remain anonymous.
Supporters
This exhibition has been
supported by:
Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
The Easton Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation
With additional support by:
Caroline and Eric Freymond
Ellen and Michael Ringier
Hauser & Wirth
Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Peder Lund
Exhibition Credits Gropius Bau
Stephanie Rosenthal, Director
Hayward Gallery Cordula Brucker, Assistant to the
Ralph Rugoff, Director Director
Katie Guggenheim, Assistant Laura Schmidt, Associate
Curator Curator, Director’s Office
Marie-Charlotte Carrier, Julienne Lorz, former Chief
Curatorial Assistant Curator
Katherine Beckwith, Curatorial Sarah Crowe, Curatorial Assistant
Intern Simone Schmaus, Head of
Lucy Biddle, Publications Exhibitions and Production
Manager Sophie Winckler, Project Manager
Imogen Winter, Senior Registrar Exhibitions
Charlotte Pearson, Senior Sophie Schattner and Anna
Registrar Viehoff, Exhibitions Fellows
Juliane Heynert, Installation Kim Teys Beavers, Head of
Manager Communications and Marketing
William Clifford, Senior Bert Schülke, Head of Technical
Installation Technician Office
Sarah Tetheridge, Senior
Installation Technician
Urszula Kossakowska, General
Manager (Maternity Cover)
Aoife Leach, General Manager
Alison Maun, Indemnity
Coordinator
Isabelle Cole, Administrator
Marcia Ceppo, Operations and
Logistics Manager
Andrea Pelagatti, Operations
Administrator
Nancy Brian, Librarian
Matt Arthurs and Philip Gardner,
Installation Technicians
Leonie Warner, Senior Visitor
Experience Manager
Kate Ford, Duty Manager
Emma Bani-Walker, Duty Manager
Gareth Spencer, Duty Manager
Southbank Centre
We are grateful to all our collabo-
rators across Southbank Centre,
without whom this exhibition
would not have been possible.
In particular, we would like to
acknowledge the contributions
of our colleagues in Southbank
Centre’s Creative Learning,
Design, Development, Digital,
Health and Safety, Marketing,
Press, Public Relations and
Retail teams.
205
Copyright Credits The publisher has made every
effort to contact all copyright
holders. If proper acknowledge-
ment has not been made, we
ask copyright holders to contact
the publisher.
Louise Bourgeois’s artwork, writ-
ings and personal photographs are
© The Easton Foundation/VAGA
at ARS, NY and DACS, London
2022, unless otherwise stated.
pp. 5 and 18 © Alex Van Gelder
and The Easton Foundation.
p. 21 © Ewa Jaroszyńska and
American Craft Council Library
& Archives.
p. 23, top and bottom © Photos,
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York/Scala, Florence.
206
Image Credits American Craft Council Library References for Quotations All excerpts from Louise 10 Loose sheet (excerpt), ca. 1993
& Archives Bourgeois’s writings are accom- (LB-0105).
p. 21 panied by the document’s inven-
tory number, courtesy Louise 11 ‘Self Expression Is Sacred and
Ron Amstutz Bourgeois Archive and The Fatal: Statements’, in Meyer-Thoss
pp. 13, 28, 39, 115, 119, 197 Easton Foundation. Punctuation 1992, p. 180.
and line breaks have been
Peter Bellamy retained as closely as possible. 12 ‘In Conversation with
pp. 11, 36 (top), 93, 189 Translations from French to Christiane Meyer-Thoss’, in
English are by Richard Sieburth Meyer-Thoss 1992, p. 134.
Christopher Burke and Françoise Gramet.
pp. 12, 15, 22, 24, 31, 34, 35, 40, 13 ‘Self Expression Is Sacred and
41, 42–43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 1 Pencil inscription on the Fatal: Statements’, in Meyer-Thoss
53, 55, 56, 57, 58–59, 60–61, 63, backside of a pamphlet titled The 1992, p. 178.
64, 65, 66–67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, Creative Process: Its Relation to
77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, Object Loss and Fetishism, by
88–89, 90, 91, 94–95, 97, 98, 99, Warner Muensterberger (reprinted
101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 116–17, from The Psychoanalytic Study of
126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, Society, vol. II), ca. 1963 (LB-0109).
135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143,
145, 146–47, 149, 150, 151, 152–53, 2 Statement for The Private
156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, Myth, a group exhibition at
165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, Tanager Gallery, New York,
175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, October 1961 (LBE-0045).
184–87, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195,
196, 198, 199 3 Loose sheet (excerpt), 14 July
1952 (LB-0309).
Jon Etter
pp. 154–55 4 ‘In Conversation with Christiane
Meyer-Thoss’, in Christiane
Allan Finkelman Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois:
pp. 71, 123, 125 Designing for Free Fall (Zurich:
Ammann Verlag, 1992), p. 123.
Maximilian Geuter
pp. 36 (bottom), 109, 110–11 5 Notebook (excerpt),
29 October 1995 (LB-0827).
Serge Hasenböhler
p. 121 6 ‘In Conversation with Paulo
Herkenhoff’, in Louise Bourgeois,
JJYPHOTO Paulo Herkenhoff, Robert Storr
p. 120 and Allan Schwartzman (London:
Phaidon, 2003), p. 22.
Jonathan Leijonhufvud
pp. 102–03 7 Loose sheet (excerpt),
2 January 1961 (LB-0043).
Marcus Schneider
pp. 112–13 8 Loose sheet (excerpt), ca. 1958
(LB-0110).
Alex Van Gelder
pp. 5, 18 9 Loose sheet (excerpt),
27 February 1957 (LB-0221).
207
Published on the occasion of
the exhibition:
Louise Bourgeois:
The Woven Child
Hayward Gallery, London
9 February – 15 May 2022
Gropius Bau, Berlin
22 July – 23 October 2022
Curated by Ralph Rugoff,
Director, Hayward Gallery, with
Julienne Lorz, former Chief
Curator, Gropius Bau
Assistant Curator: Katie
Guggenheim, Hayward Gallery
Curatorial Assistant: Marie-
Charlotte Carrier, Hayward Gallery
Associate Curator, Director’s
Office: Laura Schmidt, Gropius Bau
Curatorial Assistant: Sarah
Crowe, Gropius Bau
Co-published in 2022 by
Hayward Gallery Publishing
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
UK
www.southbankcentre.co.uk
and
Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH
Mommsenstraße 27
10629 Berlin
www.hatjecantz.com
A Ganske Publishing Group
Company
Hayward Gallery Publications
Manager: Lucy Biddle
Hatje Cantz
Project management: Adam
Jackman
Copy-editing: Kim Scott
Production: Stefanie Kruszyk
© Southbank Centre 2022 and A catalogue record for this
Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin book is available from the
Texts © the authors 2022 British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this ISBN 978-3-7757-5149-0
publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or Printed in Europe
transmitted in any form or by
any means, electrical, mechan- Cover: Louise Bourgeois,
ical or otherwise, without first Untitled, 2002
seeking the written permission
of the copyright holders and of p. 5: Louise Bourgeois at her
the publisher. The publisher has home on 20th Street in NYC, 2009
made every effort to contact
all copyright holders. If proper
acknowledgement has not been
made, we ask copyright holders
to contact the publisher.

Catalogue designed by Katy

This exhibition has been made pos- Nelson for Joseph Logan Design
sible by the provision of insurance
through the Government Indemnity Typeface: Theinhardt
Scheme. Hayward Gallery would like Printing: Livonia Print, Riga
to thank HM Government for pro- Paper: Gardamatt Ultra
viding Government Indemnity and
the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport and Arts Council England
for arranging the indemnity.