Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings was a major retrospective of one hundred drawings by one of the most acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century. Bourgeois was famous for her fetishistic sculptures and for room-size installations fraught with psychological and sexual tensions. Her abstract and figurative drawings, while less known, were no less compelling in subject and form. This project marked the first retrospective of the artist's drawings to appear in an American museum.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition began with Self-Portrait, 1938 (the year Bourgeois moved to New York from Paris) and continued with works through 1995. The drawings shared many of the same themes and imagery as Bourgeois's sculptural work. For example, the image of the house—as something both secure and confining—was a crucial element in the 1940s. Femme Maison, 1947, which was on loan from the Guggenheim Museum, is a Surrealist-tinged drawing of a figure half-house, half-woman. By this point, the spider had become a powerful metaphor in both Bourgeois's drawings and sculpture. As might be expected, a bright-red spider did not conform to its creepy-crawly image, but was "rehabilitated and made queen of a harmonious home," according to curator Lawrence Rinder.

Another recurring theme was Bourgeois's so-called toi et moi, or the "you and me," of family and human relationship. Objects and figures in the drawings often reach toward each other, turn from one thing into another, or balance each other in space. Some early drawings depict abstracted landscapes of the severe environment of the Creuse region of central France, cartoon-like figures, or bunches of wheat or grapes with long, densely packed lines that throb with a kind of rhythmic fervor. Disembodied eyes, sharp tools (scissors, clippers, etc.), as well as colorful biomorphic forms, populated some of the artist's later work. "The richness of Bourgeois' drawings," concluded Rinder, "in terms of material, technique, and theme, adds an extraordinary new dimension to our understanding of this singular artist."

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Drawing Center presented two public events. Curator Lawrence Rinder spoke on the exhibition, and Robert Storr, curator, The Museum of Modern Art, lectured on Bourgeois's work.