Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum building is bold and seductive, an art lover’s gravity-defying ivory slide toward the heavens. It’s also particularly apt to present a lifetime of work by an idiosyncratic artist whose career paralleled (but only rarely participated in) many of the 20th century’s modernisms.

Louise Bourgeois, a 97 year-old New York émigré, was raised in a wealthy French household where her father’s affair with the live-in nanny was an open secret. Accordingly, issues of parenthood, homes, bodies and space that first appeared in Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (Woman House) drawings from the 1940s and totemic Personages sculptures from a few years later are never finally treated as in certain artists’ therapeutic art practices. Instead, Bourgeois delved further into that rich childhood material, investing her art with new creative vigor in the 1960s after a hiatus of several years.

Sculpture and installation became her dominant mode thereafter, and delightfully suggestive phallus forms her favorite subject to play with (pun intended, and backed up with evidence). Distinctly feminist implications in her work also crystallized during this phase, like the breakout work The Destruction of the Father (1974) that features a family of amorphous blobs devouring their patriarch (with its macabre red lighting and fleshy forms, the scene is not unlike the Leatherfaces’ disturbing dinner sequence near the end of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

However, Bourgeois relentlessly leaves the politicizing of her work to others, insisting on the personal sources and meanings of her iconography. This creates an impression of being immersed in the self-contained narrative of her life and sealed off from specifics of geo-political time and place (hence the appropriateness of the Guggenheim building’s gently-sloping white space).

Not surprisingly, one of Bourgeois’ most recent series engages the idea of the cell, spaces that protect and imprison whose artistry lies as much in the theatrics of their display as the details of the objects they contain and conceal. The concept of the woman house comes full circle in these works, while more recent installations made from clothing and salvaged fabric quietly betray Bourgeois’ worn physique. Nevertheless, her work’s broad resonance proves her lasting relevance, a delightful ability to draw us into her narrative while revealing things about our own.

Louise Bourgeois runs at the Guggenheim through September 28, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine (reviewed here) plays at Film Forum through tomorrow. $2 off Guggenheim admission with your Film Forum ticket stub.

A similar review appears on The L Magazine's "Blog About Town", and can be read here.