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1. Inspiration?

From I saw a Chinese APP called Little Red Book, because I prefer to watch some exhibitions about art or inspiration on it, one day I saw the title about art therapy on the recommendation page, I was curious to click on, because I never thought that in addition to traditional medicine and psychologist treatment, in fact, art can also heal and form emotional counseling for people, compared to the stimulation of drugs and even damage people's physical health, art therapy seems gentle and easy to be accepted a lot. So I plan to do some more specific understanding and research mainly based on this direction.

2. Why do it?

At this stage, most people generally produce a lot of emotional backlog about the stress of various parts of life without venting when they are unconscious.

Many emotions are not processed in time, but in fact, they are hidden in the subconscious, not discovered and processed and released in time, so it leads to a lot of emotional breakdown, depression and other mental illnesses. Psychotherapy or some medication is needed to cope. For example, my uncle suffered from depression due to stress, and I wanted to see if I could really apply what I learned to life practice.

3.  What are you trying to convey to your audience?

The part I want to understand is whether art therapy can be applied to life practice, whether it can be popularized or combined with the lives of people with this part of the trouble, because traditional medicine does have some damage to the human nerves, and long-term treatment in the form of drugs does not cure the symptoms, without fundamentally solving the problem, because emotions still exist there, and have not been cleaned up and healed, just temporarily rely on drugs to suppress people "look normal", but that is only temporary, Not permanent eradication of mental disorders and emotional backlogs. Therefore, I wanted to study the explorability of art therapy through reading literature and research, and to discover some new forms.

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I think Dr. Rogers’ stance comes from her strong beliefs in the person-centered approach to therapy, which attempts to allow the client freedom to define for himself or herself the meaning of his or her art, and which empowers him or her to rely on his or her self-directed healing process. This nondirective approach is a basic tenet of person-centered therapies. Carl Rogers wrote, “Therapy is not a matter of doing something to the individual, or of inducing him to do something about himself. It is instead a matter of freeing him for normal growth and development, of removing obstacles so that he can again move forward (Rogers, 1942, p. 29).

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Person-centered or client-centered approaches are widely known. “The importance of the concepts of self and of experiencing, of empathic listening, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard, and the usefulness of verbatim typescripts and tapes of individual interview and group sessions”were all important contributions of Carl Rogers (Raskin, 1996, p. 25). Yet despite the prevalence of these ideas, person-centered approach- es have often been “misunderstood or oversimplified (Rogers, 1993, p. 99). Dr. Rogers describes the basic tenets of the person-centered approach several times throughout the book, offering a list of humanistic principles, her father’s theory of creativity, and a description of a “facilitating environment.” Descriptions and examples of the three basic “conditions for a therapeutic relationship’’ (p. 99) include empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. These descriptions are interspersed with ideas about the use of the arts therapies as “soul retrieval work,” with the application of several Jungian ideas and their theoretical implications for this work, and with a strong admonition for using the arts for social action.

In addition, Dr. Rogers emphasizes that there is “an inher- ent impulse or drive within each of us [that] longs for creative expression” (Rogers, 1993, p. 96). As a result, she offers her clients the opportunities to experiment with the arts as a method of self-exploration and self-expression. In addition, she advocates “offering stimulating and challenging experiences...designed to involve the individual in the expressive arts” as a means of facilitating an engagement with the creative process, given our culture’s predisposition to verbalizing (p. 17). Her means of involving others in the creative process is through a method she has developed called the “creative connection”-“the process of allowing one art form to influence another directly” (p. 43). Through the transitions and movement from one art form to another, one is able to maximize one’s creative response by deepening levels of work. It is through these “carefully planned experiments or experiences”(p. 17), that Dr. Rogers offers some of her best work. The book is filled with easy to understand, follow, and implement exercises designed to allow one a way to access one’s creativity, one’s self-concept, and potential for self-understanding and healing. The field of expressive therapies is emerging and developing a voice. Natalie Rogers adds an important contribution to that conversation.

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The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing

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Published in Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association (Vol. 14, No. 4, 1997)

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“We are not concerned about the beauty of the visual art.”  Nonjudgmental attitude while making art

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“We are not concerned about the beauty of the visual art.”  Nonjudgmental attitude while making art

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Dr. Rogers emphasizes an experimental, nonjudgmental attitude while making art, and goes as far as to say “we are not concerned about the beauty of the visual art.. .we leave the aesthetics and the craftsmanship to those who wish to pursue the arts professionally” (p. 2 ) . Some art therapists may have trouble with this statement, yet this approach is consistent with her theoretical orientation, and reflects her concern that evaluation, particularly external evaluation, inhibits safety and full engagement in the creative process. This argument against aesthetic concern is a familiar one for art therapists. Yet the issue is multifaceted, and we must continue to concern ourselves with the place of aesthetics in our therapy. Within the expressive therapy community, Knill, Barba, and Fuchs (1995)have said, ‘ I . . .in suppressing our aesthetic sense, we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak- wasting one of our most valuable talents for engaging the h e d n g power of the arts and for reaching depth in the psychotherapeutic relationship” (1995,p. 70).Knill, Barba, and Fuchs make the argument that beauty has the potential to nurture the soul, and that engaging our clients in an appreciation for the “imaginal, sensual, and surprising” q u a k e s of their artistic response can be healing. During one of the strongest examples Dr. Rogers gives us of the Creative Connection, Gail, a participant, says of her spontaneous drawing, “How can it be? I’m no artist, and I used my left hand, and it came out exactly as I wanted. I love it.” (p. 194). I would agree that our job as therapists is not to emphasize how “good the product is, but to recognize the pleasure achieved from the aesthetics is important. Our job must be to “make optimal and responsible use” (Knill et d.,p. 70) of aesthetics.

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 Our need, as humans, for the arts and for engagement in a creative process is sorely underestimated in our society. 

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 Our need, as humans, for the arts and for engagement in a creative process is sorely underestimated in our society. 

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Our need, as humans, for the arts and for engagement in a creative process is sorely underestimated in our society. We need as many languages for authenticity as we can find. Natalie Rogers recognizes that people need to be reminded of their innate drive towards creative expression. She proposes that people be invited into the arts through a variety of exercises designed to reawaken the creative spirit.

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Marguerite Humeau,b, 1986French contemporary artist.The colors of dreams and the fantasy of fairy tales can be expressed in art"

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Marguerite Humeau,b, 1986French contemporary artist.The colors of dreams and the fantasy of fairy tales can be expressed in art"

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The use of artistic methods to treat psychological disorders and enhance mental health is known as art therapy. Art therapy is a technique rooted in the idea that creative expression can foster healing and mental well-being.

People have been relying on the arts for communication, self-expression, and healing for thousands of years. But art therapy didn't start to become a formal program until the 1940s.

Doctors noted that individuals living with mental illness often expressed themselves in drawings and other artworks, which led many to explore the use of art as a healing strategy. Since then, art has become an important part of the therapeutic field and is used in some assessment and treatment techniques.

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Art therapy is a treatment approach that integrates psychotherapeutic techniques with the creative process to improve well-being. Learn more about art therapy.

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A case is needed to support:

For example, who does what work on treatment?
Are there any celebrities who have made a difference, or maybe artists.
You need an example need a case study case study and need to take an answer think I'm going to learn here. Who has done a lot of work in our treatment.

Through the painting exhibition, we analyze Yayoi Kusama's analysis of the aspects of art healing.
Kusama Art: How has her art helped her improve your mental health?
People miss the meaning of art and don't understand art .Another great example, but a lot of people have written about Yayoi Kusama and psychology. You can really easily find enough information for two and a half thousand words and then apply it to some of them.

Take a look at Kusama's work, and as an example, you might talk about how she explores things that will help you through practice, commercial use or otherwise.

Make art available for sale and commercial use

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She's a trauma dealer, and she's dealing with trauma in her life through her art.

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J Analytical Psychology - 2002 - Kradin - Generosity  a psychological and interpersonal motivational factor of therapeutic

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“Kusama” redirects here. For the film director, see Karyn Kusama.

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Yayoi Kusama began painting "Infinity Nets," the artist's longest-running series, after moving to New York City in 1958. For Kusama, these abstract works covered in repeated, curved brushstrokes are an essential form of art therapy, inspired in part by her hallucinatory visions. "My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them," she once explained. "They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me." In pursuit of this infinite abyss, Kusama has even painted her "Infinity Nets" in uninterrupted sessions of 40 to 50 hours. In 2014, this influential series set records in the art market. Her monochromatic "Infinity Net" White No. 28 (1960) was sold at auction for $7.1 million, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living female artist.

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Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Nets - For Sale on Artsy

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Yayoi Kusama began painting "Infinity Nets," the artist's longest-running series, after moving to New York City in 1958. For Kusama, these abstract works covered in repeated, curved brushstrokes are an essential form of art therapy, inspired in part by her hallucinatory visions.

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Picture it, Manhattan 2013. It is nearly Thanksgiving, and you find yourself on West 19th bundled up in the Meatpacking District, stamping your feet to keep warm in a line of people snaking all the way around to 10th Avenue. If you had your druthers, this is not the most charming corner of town where you would loiter. It stinks, literally, not exactly the ambiance of an art gallery. The odor is due in part to the nearby water treatment center and meatpacking plants-fancy. If you are smelling death and decay, you know you are in the right spot. However, today you are not morose. You do not growl at passersby or complain that your toes might be frostbitten. You stand on the corner with bated breath because you know something exceptional waits just around the corner, Kusama's installation.

Art of the Infinite

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist created an infinity mirror room, Love is Calling, at the famed David Zwirner Gallery. When you enter, you leave the stinky, frigid reality of a late-fall Manhattan street and escape elsewhere. The lights are neon, there are mirrors on all sides, and thousands of polka dots decorate the room. This is Yayoi Kusama's installation. You might try to snap a selfie, but it will never be quite right; the neon lighting creates a shimmering haze and there are infinite reflections and refractions happening around you. Like a casino, you could easily spend hours in the room without realizing it. You are snapped out of your trance by a waifish gallerist dressed in black. They are surprisingly powerful for petite young women, and, before you know it, you are outside of the gallery. If not for the cold air, you would still feel floaty and dazed. And what's more, the only thing you can see is polka dots.

So What Exactly Is An Infinity Room?

If Kusama's artwork were capitulated in a single word, that word would be infinity. Why not polka dots, you ask? While the dots are essential, they are a symbolic stand-in for infinity. How Yayoi Kusama experiences consciousness is unique. While the average person will notice the objects in their surroundings or if it is light or dark or maybe the temperature or the smell of the room, most will only take note of a few of those details. For Kusama, she experiences all the things listed above and more. On top of all the information our senses give a person about their reality, she also hallucinates polka dots. She uses the infinity room or net to describe this. The polka dots immerse her entire existence, similar to the funhouse effect created by mirrors reflecting against each other. The dancing lights in her rooms remove the viewer from their own reality. Polka dots loom so mainly in her reality that sometimes she loses the concept of depth or time. Imagine infinite space. An infinity net creates a similar effect but with netting that encapsulates the viewer rather than reflecting them in a mirrored room.
Read also: Five Illuminating Facts About Dan Flavin
The Obliteration of Nothingness

Sometimes, Kusama explores the concept of infinity with the opposite approach. In her obliteration rooms she explores infinity as an idea rooted in nothingness. The dots pile up on an otherwise pristine white room and cancel each other out. Dots which would hold their own space within an infinity room, collapse together in the obliteration rooms. They take up space and they exist to a point where it is hard to decipher what is a dot and what isn't one. The room has become both dot-filled and without dot forms all at once. The polemic of infinity is important because it does not just represent everything, it also represents nothing.

The Obliteration Room, photo by Stephan Ridgeway via Wikimedia Commons

Read also: Inside The Borderless World of TeamLab
This concept repeats across her entire oeuvre, in paintings, drawings, illustrations of popular children's stories, soft sculptures, and even pumpkins. The polka dot is the modality she uses to describe her experience to the world. The Tate Museum, London has even deemed her the Princess of Polka Dots.

In The Beginning, There Were Polka Dots

In the context of her painting Flower (D.S.P.S), she explains how the polka dot hallucinations started. In her childhood home, she sat doodling and spacing out as ten-year-olds do. When she looked up from the red, floral tablecloth, the red dots she was focusing on were everywhere. They were on the wall, the floor, the ceilings, and even the stairs. Space and time collapsed into a singular polka dot-based reality. It was such a vivid hallucination that she couldn't capture the depth when young Kusama climbed the stairs. However, this was not a simple childhood mishap like spinning in too many circles and getting dizzy. The dots never stopped appearing to Kusama. While others might take this on the chin and abandon their life plan, she made polka dots her greatest strength, and the polka dots act as what she calls her "way to infinity."

Did Polka Dots Define A Revolution?

In the hands of Yayoi, bona fide polka dot royalty, polka dots percolated with power. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kusama became fascinated with the re-imagined landscape of American counter-culture. New York was the east coast outpost for countercultural happenings, while the west had San Francisco. The Fillmore, a popular counterculture venue, had two locations: one in New York's East Village and another in San Francisco's eponymous Fillmore neighborhood. Drawn to the happenings of hippies and protests, she moved to New York City. Kusama even performed at Fillmore East with Fleetwood Mac.

The psychedelic colors of the sixties pulse as if on an electric charge in Flower D.S.P.S. and certainly pulsed in the light shows Yayoi set up for musicians and audience alike to immerse themselves, obliterating sensory divisions between individual beings, light, and sound.

Metaphoric Mappings: Symbols of Trauma

Fred W. McDarrah, Artist Yayoi Kusama Poses on Brooklyn Bridge
in Polka Dots, 1968 via Pinterest

Against the backdrop of free love and good vibes, polka dots might appear equally light-hearted and straightforward. However, as with so many artists, Kusama's dots belie something darker, textured, and traumatic. Her work in the 1960s plays with the tensions between ditzy patterns and a dark personal history seeking resolution as dotted delusions.

Yayoi grew up in a well-to-do family of Japanese seed merchants. Rather than embodying the simple beauty of the flowers her family sold, Yayoi's childhood was unstable. Parental figures in Kusama's life were not evergreen. She was subject to not only emotional neglect but abuse.

Kusama's father was a cad, or worse. He was never present and chased anything with a skirt, including the household staff. Her mother was distraught by his philandering. Rather than focusing her attention on Yayoi as a child needing love, her mother chose to engage with his craziness. When Yayoi expressed interest in the arts, her parents stifled her dreams. Some say they went as far as tearing up Kusama's artwork.

Growing up in this pressure-cooker situation, it is not shocking that Yayoi experiences mental illness. The mind can only take so much trauma and neglect. In service of protecting her, perhaps her subconscious brought about polka dots as a coping mechanism.

Once she began making artwork in New York, the scars of her youth were laid bare. As a protest to the Vietnam War, Kusama would pose coquettishly in public spaces such as the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park. In these situations, she was photographed nude, with a kittenish smirk, surrounded by polka dots. Sometimes if her exhibitions happened in public, she chose instead to wear a polka dotted leotard. Her play with the female form belies larger issues within her biography. Yayoi Kusama admits that she fears men. Her father's misogyny and abusive behavior broke a forgotten child. It only seems appropriate for her to question male authority as well as culturally ingrained misogyny.

But while she examines male motivations, she does not hate men. Some of her most ardent supporters are her male colleagues, including Frank Stella and Donald Judd. She had close platonic relationships with artists Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell. After Cornell's death, she fell into a deep depression, which resulted in a return to Japan.

Polka Dot Metabolism

When Kusama returned to Japan in the early 70s, she was very ill. She had become grief-stricken following her close friend's death and was getting backlash for her nude artwork. Her family believed that the nudity was disrespectful.

In return, Kusama experienced feelings of shame. Shame teamed with deepening depression lead to a suicide attempt. So, when she returned to Japan, she checked herself into the hospital and still lives there today. She keeps a studio a few blocks from the hospital and will take occasional business trips abroad when her dancing LED displays necessitate travel.

During the early days of her hospitalization, she wrote novellas, short stories, and other texts with a surrealist tilt. Polka dots remained an extensive aspect of her work, even within the writing.

She strips herself bare and processes her experiences. At first glance, it would appear as though her insanity drives her fame and genius. However, this is too easy, a logical trap. While she certainly does experience mental illness and enjoys a medical institution's relative stability and safety, she is not insane. Art is the way that she integrates and metabolizes her condition. Her artworks are a method to work through her experiences.

The fact that she shares her artwork with the world is mind-blowing. It would be like someone sharing a diary or the notes app (please don't read my unfortunate, handwritten book).

That certainly does not sound like the works of a madwoman; although, given the polka-dotted subject matter, it can be easy to conflate brilliance and illness. She comes across as a grounded, sane individual. She enjoys Godiva chocolates and wearing her hair just so-very human traits. It just so happens she also sees dots all the time. No one can help some of life's circumstances, but they can face them every day. Kusama faces her reality every day. The stunning installations she creates are unique and brilliant because she is all these things, and she is, most importantly, more than her illness.

Simply Playful, or Cosmic & Universal?

Kusama credits herself with popularizing the polka dot, and frankly, for all she has done for the pattern, she deserves it. She became a scion of contemporary art with them. The immersive qualities of her work make it clear to any viewer, not just initiated art-insiders.

The dots make for compelling and sometimes hypnotic subjects. The simplicity of the work lends itself to other applications. While people who do not study art may not remember her name, they will most certainly recognize her work. She not only won admiration from critics and her contemporaries alike but, she has also lent her polka dots to the visual culture at large.

If you wish, you can even have a Kusama in your house. One of her silliest, most delightful series is her pumpkins. They range in size from a six-inch gourd that would sit comfortably on a desk to ones that are over six feet. Some of her pumpkins are paintings and always in black and yellow or red and white. They are a light-hearted change to an oeuvre that is often heavy.

Through collaborations with major retailers, she has been able to leave an indelible stamp on popular culture. She has worked with Louis Vuitton, a fashion house well-known for working with visual artists, including Murakami. The Murakami rainbow-bright iteration of the bags popularized by Paris Hilton is a famous example. Kusama's collaboration boasts punchy primary colors and a meandering dot pattern, modeled by Yayoi Kusama herself.

Yayoi has also worked with Lancôme (interestingly another Paris Hilton favorite) to create Juicy Tubes of lip gloss in her vibrant red. She even had a corner devoted to her art, design, and style within Bloomingdale's. Nothing says "I've made it" quite like presence at an iconic department store.

Perhaps one could speculate on the cultural significance of an artist when their work changes our perception of the ordinary material objects that surround us in our visual culture.

Almost like her lifelong friend Andy Warhol, who called our attention to the mundane materiality of a soup can, Yayoi's work resonates when everyday items like vending machines and soda cans, lip gloss tubes and parade balloons turn up with polka dots.

In 2019 Yayoi's balloon "Love Flies Up To The Sky" soared over the crowds taking in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Not only do her effervescent bubbles shift our perception of soda cans but they draw our attention to the vending machine as well.

However, her influence extends beyond the interests of famous hotel heiresses and discerning Bloomingdale's shoppers. In 2016, she released an illustrated version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum, in Andersen's native Denmark.

The book uses some drawings from the artist's black marker series of 2007 and some new images expressly made for the story. This book is no Disney production filled with red-headed mermaids and singing crustaceans. Instead, she leans into Andersen's original tale of Christian piety, where the young mermaid sacrifices herself so that she can have a human soul. It is also a story of infinity. The idea of everlasting life through the redemption of Christ is a story about infinity. No soul is ever lost.

Endlessness

Yayoi Kusama explores the human experience; she visits psychic depths and creates cosmic spaces for wanderers to lose track of edges and boundaries and time. There is neither end nor beginning but now. Long live the Princess of Polka Dots.
Bibliography
Nicole Lania is an art historian and writer who has years of experience finding genuine creativity in a world of thinly veiled reproductions. She earned a master's degree from New York University with a focus on contemporary art and writing; her thesis was on the impact Christo's The Gates had on the cultural capital of Central Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. She can be found walking her dog, Tucker through the New England wilderness or baking pastries in her kitchen. Nicole can be found on Instagram @nik.lania, Twitter @NicoleLania1, or her website http://www.nicolelania.com/.

Kusama, Yayoi. 2020. Yayoi Kusama Exhibition. Accessed December 20, 2020. http://yayoi-kusama.jp/e/exhibitions/00.html#13.

Nayeri, Farrah. 2012. Man-Hating Artist Kusama Covers the Tate Modern in Dots: Interview. February 12. Accessed December 20, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20120216045527/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-14/man-hating-artist-kusama-covers-tate-modern-in-dots-interview.html.

Tate Kids. n.d. Who is Yayoi Kusama. Accessed December 2020, 20. https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-yayoi-kusama.

Voon, Claire. 2016. Hyperallergic. August 2016. Accessed December 20, 2020. https://hyperallergic.com/316111/a-new-wave-little-mermaid-illustrated-by-yayoi-kusama/.

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Picture it, Manhattan 2013. It is nearly Thanksgiving, and you find yourself on West 19th bundled up in the Meatpacking District, stamping your feet to keep warm in a line of people snaking all the way around to 10th Avenue. If you had your druthers, this is not the most charming corner of town where you would loiter.

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( Louise Joséphine Bourgeois ( French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] listen ); 25 December 1911 - 31 May 2010)[1] was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious.[2] These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Sculpture by Bourgeois in the Domestic Incidents group exhibit at London's Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 2006

Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France. She was the middle child of three born to parents Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn. The lower part of the tapestries were always damaged which was usually a result of the characters' feet and animals' paws.

In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, subjects that she valued for their stability, saying "I got peace of mind, only through the study of rules nobody could change."

Her mother died in 1932, while Bourgeois was studying mathematics. Her mother's death inspired her to abandon mathematics and to begin studying art. She continued to study art by joining classes where translators were needed for English-speaking students, especially because translators were not charged tuition. In one such class, Fernand Léger saw her work and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter. Bourgeois took a job as a docent, leading tours at the Musée du Louvre.

Bourgeois graduated from the Sorbonne in 1935. She began studying art in Paris, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and École du Louvre, and after 1932 in the independent academies of Montparnasse and Montmartre such as Académie Colarossi, Académie Ranson, Académie Julian, Académie de la Grande Chaumière and with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, Paul Colin and Cassandre. Bourgeois had a desire for first-hand experience and frequently visited studios in Paris, learning techniques from the artists and assisting with exhibitions. From 1934 to 1938, she is said to have apprenticed herself to some of the so-called "masters" of the time, including Fernand Léger, Paul Colin, and André Lhote. Later, however, Bourgeois became disillusioned with the conception of patriarchal genius which dominated the art world, a change motivated in part by these masters' refusal to recognize women artists.

In 1938, she opened her own gallery in a space next door to her father's tapestry gallery where she showed the work of artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse and Suzanne Valadon, and where she met visiting American art professor Robert Goldwater as a customer. They married and moved to the United States (where he taught at New York University). They had three sons; one was adopted. The marriage lasted until Goldwater's death in 1973.

Bourgeois settled in New York City with her husband in 1938. She continued her education at the Art Students League of New York, studying painting under Vaclav Vytlacil, and also producing sculptures and prints. "The first painting had a grid: the grid is a very peaceful thing because nothing can go wrong ... everything is complete. There is no room for anxiety ... everything has a place, everything is welcome."

Bourgeois incorporated those autobiographical references to her sculpture Quarantania I, on display in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Confrérie (c.1940) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022

For Bourgeois, the early 1940s represented the difficulties of a transition to a new country and the struggle to enter the exhibition world of New York City. Her work during this time was constructed from junkyard scraps and driftwood which she used to carve upright wood sculptures. The impurities of the wood were then camouflaged with paint, after which nails were employed to invent holes and scratches in the endeavor to portray some emotion. The Sleeping Figure is one such example which depicts a war figure that is unable to face the real world due to vulnerability. Throughout her life, Bourgeois's work was created from revisiting her own troubled past as she found inspiration and temporary catharsis from her childhood years and the abuse she suffered from her father. Slowly she developed more artistic confidence, although her middle years are more opaque, which might be due to the fact that she received very little attention from the art world despite having her first solo show in 1945. In 1951, her father died and she became an American citizen.

In 1945, Bourgeois was featured in an exhibition of fourteen women artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, aptly titled "The Women." While this exhibition stimulated debate about the place of women artists in the art world, it also defined them as separate from their canonized male counterparts and reinforced the damaging notion of a universally feminine experience. Commenting on her reception as a woman artist in the 1940s, Bourgeois said that she doesn't "know what art made by a woman is....There is no feminine experience in art, at least not in my case, because not just by being a woman does one have a different experience."

In 1954, Bourgeois joined the American Abstract Artists Group, with several contemporaries, among them Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. At this time she also befriended the artists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. As part of the American Abstract Artists Group, Bourgeois made the transition from wood and upright structures to marble, plaster, and bronze as she investigated concerns like fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. This transition was a turning point. She referred to her art as a series or sequence closely related to days and circumstances, describing her early work as the fear of falling which later transformed into the art of falling and the final evolution as the art of hanging in there. Her conflicts in real life empowered her to authenticate her experiences and struggles through a unique art form. In 1958, Bourgeois and her husband moved into a terraced house at West 20th Street, in Chelsea, Manhattan, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.

Despite the fact that she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois's subject was the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso self-portrait (1963-1964), and Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the feminine body. In the late 1960s, her imagery became more explicitly sexual as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. Sexually explicit sculptures such as Janus Fleuri (1968) show she was not afraid to use the female form in new ways. She stated, "My work deals with problems that are pre-gender," she wrote. "For example, jealousy is not male or female." With the rise of feminism, her work found a wider audience. Despite this assertion, in 1976 Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard's book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art and became an icon of the feminist art movement.

In 1973, Bourgeois started teaching at the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. From 1974 until 1977, Bourgeois worked at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she taught printmaking and sculpture. She also taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island.

In the early 1970s, Bourgeois held gatherings called "Sunday, bloody Sundays" at her home in Chelsea. These salons would be filled with young artists and students whose work would be critiqued by Bourgeois. Bourgeois's ruthlessness in critique and her dry sense of humor led to the naming of these meetings. Bourgeois inspired many young students to make art that was feminist in nature. However, Louise's long-time friend and assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, has stated that Louise considered her own work "pre-gender."

Bourgeois aligned herself with activists and became a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective founded by fellow artist Anita Steckel. In the 1970s, the group defended the use of sexual imagery in artwork. Steckel argued, "If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women."

In 1978 Bourgeois was commissioned by the General Services Administration to create Facets of the Sun, her first public sculpture. The work was installed outside of a federal building in Manchester, New Hampshire. Bourgeois received her first retrospective in 1982, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Until then, she had been a peripheral figure in art whose work was more admired than acclaimed. In an interview with , timed to coincide with the opening of her retrospective, she revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was wholly autobiographical. She shared with the world that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, as a child, that her English governess was also her father's mistress.

Between the years of 1984 and 1986, Bourgeois created a series of sculptures all under the title Nature Study which continued her lifetime commitment of challenging patriarchal standards and traditional methods of femininity in art.

Bourgeois inside her sculpture Cell IV, in 1991

In 1989, Bourgeois made a drypoint etching, Mud Lane, of the home she maintained in Stapleton, Staten Island, which she treated as a sculptural environment rather than a living space.

Bourgeois had another retrospective in 1989 at Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany. In 1993, when the Royal Academy of Arts staged its comprehensive survey of American art in the 20th century, the organizers did not consider Bourgeois's work of significant importance to include in the survey. However, this survey was criticized for many omissions, with one critic writing that "whole sections of the best American art have been wiped out" and pointing out that very few women were included. In 2000 her works were selected to be shown at the opening of the Tate Modern in London. In 2001, she showed at the Hermitage Museum.

In 2010, the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender ( LGBT) equality. She created the piece I Do, depicting two flowers growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization Freedom to Marry. Bourgeois has said "Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing." Bourgeois had a history of activism on behalf of LGBT equality, having created artwork for the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in 1993.

Bourgeois died of heart failure on 31 May 2010, at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Wendy Williams, the managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio, announced her death. She had continued to create artwork until her death, her last pieces being finished the week before.

The New York Times said that her work "shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world."

Her husband, Robert Goldwater, died in 1973. She was survived by two sons, Alain Bourgeois and Jean-Louis Bourgeois. Her first son, Michel, died in 1990.

Femme Maison (1946-47) is a series of paintings in which Bourgeois explores the relationship of a woman and the home. In the works, women's heads have been replaced with houses, isolating their bodies from the outside world and keeping their minds domestic. This theme goes along with the dehumanization of modern art.

Destruction of the Father (1974) is a biographical and a psychological exploration of the power dominance of father and his offspring. The piece is a flesh-toned installation in a soft and womb-like room. Made of plaster, latex, wood, fabric, and red light, Destruction of the Father was the first piece in which she used soft materials on a large scale. Upon entering the installation, the viewer stands in the aftermath of a crime. Set in a stylized dining room (with the dual impact of a bedroom), the abstract blob-like children of an overbearing father have rebelled, murdered, and eaten him.

... telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. There is tragedy in the air. Once too often he has said his piece. He is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself. A kind of resentment grows and one day my brother and I decided, 'the time has come!' We grabbed him, laid him on the table and with our knives dissected him. We took him apart and dismembered him, we cut off his penis. And he became food. We ate him up ... he was liquidated the same way he liquidated the children.[failed verification ]

In 1982, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City featured unknown artist, Louise Bourgeois' work. She was 70 years old and a mixed media artist who worked on paper and with metal, marble and animal skeletal bones. Childhood family traumas "bred an exorcism in art", and she desperately attempted to purge her unrest through her work. She felt she could get in touch with issues of female identity, the body, and the fractured family long before the art world and society considered them as subjects to be expressed in art. This was Bourgeois' way to find her center and stabilize her emotional unrest. The New York Times said at the time that "her work is charged with tenderness and violence, acceptance and defiance, ambivalence and conviction."

While in her eighties, Bourgeois produced two series of enclosed installation works she referred to as Cells. Many are small enclosures into which the viewer is prompted to peer inward at arrangements of symbolic objects; others are small rooms into which the viewer is invited to enter. In the cell pieces, Bourgeois uses earlier sculptural forms, found objects as well as personal items that carried strong personal emotional charge for the artist.

The cells enclose psychological and intellectual states, primarily feelings of fear and pain. Bourgeois stated that the Cells represent "different types of pain; physical, emotional and psychological, mental and intellectual ... Each Cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain ... Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at."

Bourgeois's Maman sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

In the late 1990s, Bourgeois began using the spider as a central image in her art. , which stands more than nine metres high, is a steel and marble sculpture from which an edition of six bronzes were subsequently cast. It first made an appearance as part of Bourgeois's commission for The Unilever Series for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000, and recently, the sculpture was installed at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, Qatar. Her largest spider sculpture titled stands at over 30 feet (9.1 m) and has been installed in numerous locations around the world. It is the largest Spider sculpture ever made by Bourgeois. Moreover, Maman alludes to the strength of her mother, with metaphors of spinning, weaving, nurture and protection. The prevalence of the spider motif in her work has given rise to her nickname as Spiderwoman.

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

Maisons fragiles / Empty Houses

Bourgeois's Maisons fragiles / Empty Houses sculptures are parallel, high metallic structures supporting a simple tray. One must see them in person to feel their impact. They are not threatening or protecting, but bring out the depths of anxiety within you. Bachelard's findings from psychologists' tests show that an anxious child will draw a tall narrow house with no base. Bourgeois had a rocky/traumatic childhood and this could support the reason behind why these pieces were constructed.

Bourgeois's printmaking flourished during the early and late phases of her career: in the 1930s and 1940s, when she first came to New York from Paris, and then again starting in the 1980s, when her work began to receive wide recognition. Early on, she made prints at home on a small press, or at the renowned workshop Atelier 17. That period was followed by a long hiatus, as Bourgeois turned her attention fully to sculpture. It was not until she was in her seventies that she began to make prints again, encouraged first by print publishers. She set up her old press, and added a second, while also working closely with printers who came to her house to collaborate. A very active phase of printmaking followed, lasting until the artist's death. Over the course of her life, Bourgeois created approximately 1,500 printed compositions.

In 1990, Bourgeois decided to donate the complete archive of her printed work to The Museum of Modern Art. In 2013, The Museum launched the online catalogue raisonné, "Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books." The site focuses on the artist's creative process and places Bourgeois's prints and illustrated books within the context of her overall production by including related works in other mediums that deal with the same themes and imagery.

Bourgeois's sculpture Cell XIV (Portrait) at Tate Gallery, 2016

One theme of Bourgeois's work is that of childhood trauma and hidden emotion. After Louise's mother became sick with influenza Louise's father began having affairs with other women, most notably with Sadie, Louise's English tutor. He would bring mistresses back home and be unfaithful in front of his whole family. Louise was extremely watchful and aware of the situation. This was the beginning of the artist's engagement with double standards related to gender and sexuality, which was expressed in much of her work. She recalls her father saying "I love you" repeatedly to her mother, despite infidelity. "He was the wolf, and she was the rational hare, forgiving and accepting him as he was." Her 1993 work Cell: You Better Grow Up, part of her Cell series, speaks directly to Louise's childhood trauma and the insecurity that surrounded her. 2002's Give or Take is defined by hidden emotion, representing the intense dilemma that people face throughout their lives as they attempt to balance the actions of giving and taking. This dilemma is not only represented by the shape of the sculpture, but also the heaviness of the material this piece is made of.[original research? ]

Motherhood is another recurrent theme of Bourgeois's work. It was her mother who encouraged Bourgeois to draw and who involved her in the tapestry business. Bourgeois considered her mother to be intellectual and methodical; the continued motif of the spider in her work often represents her mother. The notion of a spider that spins and weaves its web is a direct reference to her parents' tapestry business and can also be seen as a metaphor for her mother, who repairs things.

Bourgeois has explored the concept of feminity through challenging the patriarchal standards and making artwork about motherhood rather than showing women as muses or ideals. She has been described as the 'reluctant hero of feminist art'. Louise Bourgeois had a feminist approach to her work similar to fellow artists such as Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, less driven by the political but rather made work that drew on their experiences of gender and sexuality, naturally engaging with women's issues.

Architecture and memory are important components of Bourgeois's work. Bourgeois's work are very organic, biological, reproductive feel to them; they draw attention to the work itself. Louise describes architecture as a visual expression of memory, or memory as a type of architecture. The memory which is featured in much of her work is an invented memory - about the death or exorcism of her father. The imagined memory is interwoven with her real memories including living across from a slaughterhouse and her father's affair. To Louise her father represented injury and war, aggrandizement of himself and belittlement of others and most importantly a man who represented betrayal. Her 1993 work Cell (Three White Marble Spheres) speaks to fear and captivity. The mirrors within the present an altered and distorted reality.[original research? ]

Sexuality is undoubtedly one of the most important themes in the work of Louise Bourgeois. The link between sexuality and fragility or insecurity is also powerful. It has been argued that this stems from her childhood memories and her father's affairs. 1952's Spiral Woman combines Louise's focus on female sexuality and torture. The flexing leg and arm muscles indicate that the Spiral Woman is still above though she is being suffocated and hung. 1995's In and Out uses cold metal materials to link sexuality with anger and perhaps even captivity.[original research? ]

The spiral in her work demonstrates the dangerous search for precarious equilibrium, accident-free permanent change, disarray, vertigo, whirlwind. There lies the simultaneously positive and negative, both future and past, breakup and return, hope and vanity, plan and memory.[original research? ]

Louise Bourgeois's work is powered by confessions, self-portraits, memories, fantasies of a restless being who is seeking through her sculpture a peace and an order which were missing throughout her childhood.

This collaboration took place over a span of two years with British artist Tracey Emin. The work was exhibited in London months after Bourgeois's death in 2010. The subject matter consists of male and female images. Although they appear sexual, it portrays a tiny female figure paying homage to a giant male figure, like a God. Louise Bourgeois did the water colors and Tracey Emin did the drawing on top. It took Emin two years to decide how to figure out what she would contribute in the collaboration. When she knew what to do, she finished all of the drawings in a day and believes every single one worked out perfectly. I Lost You is about losing children, losing life. Bourgeois had to bury her son as a parent. Abandonment for her is not only about losing her mother but her son as well. Despite the age gap between the two artists and differences in their work, the collaboration worked out gently and easily.[according to whom? ]

Notable exhibitions and site-specific projects (selection)

Louise Bourgeois' work continues to be exhibited in museums and public spaces through the shape of site-specific installations around the world. For example, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, has presented a collection of the artist's pieces in marble and other materials for nearly a decade.

Aranha, Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (5878031270)

The large-scale sculpture Maman, acquired by the Itaú Cultural Institute in 1996 and lent to the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Brazil, was sent on a multi-city tour to institutions and public areas such as the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais, the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, and then to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba.

In 2020, Bourgeois work was featured in a major group show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. My Body, My Rules, presented an investigating about the diverse artistic practices of 23 female-identified artists in the 21st-century. Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Ana Mendieta, Wanguechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Francesca Woodman, were among them.

1967 - Untitled at National Academy of Design, New York City.

1987 - Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture 1947-1955 at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California.

1993 - Helping Hands in permanent display at Chicago Women's Park & Gardens as of 2011, Chicago.

1994 - Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993 at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

1999 - Maman at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao.

1999 - Granite eyeball benches and 25' bronze water fountain, at Agnes R. Katz Plaza, Pittsburgh, PA. Sculptures are currently on permanent display.

2000 - Fallen Woman at Galleria d'arte moderna Palazzo Forti, Verona.

2010 - Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works, at Fondazione Vedova Venice. Travelling to Hauser & Wirth, London.

2010 - Louise Bourgeois: Mother and Child at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California.

2011 - Louise Bourgeois. The Return of the Repressed, at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires.Travelling to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.

2019 - 1999-12-03 Abels, Carolyn, "Katz Plaza in Cultural District is Dedicated," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (v73, n125, B-1)

Major holdings of her work include:

Throughout her career, Bourgeois knew many of her core collectors, such as Ginny Williams, Agnes Gund, Ydessa Hendeles and Ursula Hauser. Other private collections with notable Bourgeois pieces include the Goetz Collection in Munich.

Bourgeois started working with gallerist Paule Anglim in San Francisco in 1987, Karsten Greve in Paris in 1990, and Hauser & Wirth in 1997. Hauser & Wirth has been the principal gallery for her estate. Others, such as Kukje Gallery in Seoul and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels continue to deal in her work.

In 2011 one of Bourgeois's works, titled , sold for $10.7 million, a new record price for the artist at auction, and the highest price paid for a work by a woman at the time. In late 2015, the piece sold at another Christie's auction for $28.2 million.

Heartney, Eleanor; Posner, Helaine; Princenthal, Nancy; Scott, Sue (2007). After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Prestel Publishing Ltd. p. 351. ISBN 978-3-7913-4755-4.

Armstrong, Carol (2006). Women Artists at the Millennium. October Books. p. 408. ISBN 978-0-262-01226-3.

Herskovic, Marika (2003). American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey. New York School Press. p. 372. ISBN 978-0-9677994-1-4.

Herskovic, Marika (2000). New York School: Abstract Expressionists. New York School Press. p. 393. ISBN 978-0-9677994-0-7.

Deepwell, Katy (May 1997). Deepwell, Katy (ed.). "Feminist Readings of Louise Bourgeois or Why Louise Bourgeois is a Feminist Icon". N.paradoxa. London: KT Press (3): 28-38. ISSN 1461-0426.

Wasilik, Jeanne M. (1987). Assemblage. Kent Fine Art, Inc. p. 44. ISBN 978-1-878607-15-7.

Louise Bourgeois in The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/a-confessional-sculpture-by-louise-bourgeois

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( Louise Joséphine Bourgeois ( French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] listen ); 25 December 1911 - 31 May 2010)[1] was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker.

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Introduction

With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.

Using drawings, prints, sculpture and fabric works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, this resource takes an in-depth look at her work through the themes and ideas of this extraordinary artist.

Meet Louise Bourgeois

Before exploring the themes behind her work, meet the artist. In this video, Louise Bourgeois lets us into her home and shares insights into her life and work.

Childhood Trauma

Whatever materials and processes Louise Bourgeois used to create her powerful artworks, the main force behind her art was to work through her troubled childhood memories. These memories were not specific, but a layering of emotional responses to the complicated relationship she had with her parents and their relationship with each other.

Abandonment

Bourgeois's mother, Joséphine, suffered from ill health and Louise cared for her for long periods of time. Josephine died when Louise was just 22. This, and her father's unfaithfulness (he had a series of mistresses), led to a fear of abandonment, a key theme in Bourgeois's work. The backdrop of the First World War, which began when she was three years old, made her traumatic memories of childhood even more intense.

Opposing forces

Bourgeois's mother and father had very different characters. Her mother had a logical and intellectual approach to life, in contrast to the emotive and passionate character of her father. These opposing forces became a key theme of much of her later work. Her double-headed sculptures suggest the sense of two very separate forces relentlessly attached together. Janus Fleuri 1968 consists of two forms joined back to back but apparently pulling away from each other.

The spider

In 1947 Louise Bourgeois drew two small ink and charcoal drawings of a spider. Fifty years later in the late 1990s, she created a series of steel and bronze spider sculptures.

In a 2008 film made about her life, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, Bourgeois described these spider sculptures as her 'most successful subject'. Bourgeois uses the spider, both predator (a sinister threat) and protector (an industrious repairer), to symbolise the mother figure. The spinning and weaving of the spider's web links to Bourgeois's own mother, who worked in the family's tapestry restoration business, and who encouraged Louise to participate.

What Do You Think? Materials and Meanings

Explore the different materials Louise Bourgeois used.

Look at Louise Bourgeois's work in Art & Artists.

Think about what the different materials she uses adds to how the artworks look and the tactile effect they give the work.

Think about what emotions the materials might reflect and how this affects your interpretation of the work.

In 1938, just before the breakout of the Second World War, Louise Bourgeois left Paris for New York with her new husband Robert Goldwater. This move away from everything that was familiar affected her greatly. Early paintings in New York such as Runaway Girl c.1938 depict Bourgeois leaving behind her childhood home. Fallen Woman (Femme Maison) 1946-7 depicts a female figure with her head and torso covered in a house. Bourgeois wrote:

She does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she's hiding.

Running away

Louise Bourgeois's longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, compares Bourgeois from this period with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz 1939:

Like the young runaway Dorothy Gale from Kansas, Bourgeois has been on a journey to alleviate a core experience of abandonment.

Bourgeois revisited the theme of running away from home in the drawing Home for Runaway Girls 1994. In this work the words 'HOME FOR RUNAWAY GIRLS: EMPTY HOUSES. LES FILLE MERE D'ANTHONY.' are painted in gouache on sandpaper. (Mere D'Anthony was a real girls' home in Paris). Bourgeois reminds us of her ongoing feelings of displacement and her belief in art as form of therapy and escape. The artwork is oval shaped and looks a little like a door plaque. But the rough textured surface looks at odds with the comforts usually associated with 'home'.

The fallen woman

Bourgeois returned to the theme of the fallen woman in her sculpture Fallen Woman 1981, a small bronze sculpture, with a woman's head attached to a phallic-shaped handle. It looks like a club or truncheon. The figure looks sad and pathetic, and unable to make use of the power suggested by her weapon-like form.

Bourgeois said that her early work could be related to 'a fear of falling' and 'later a fear of failing'.

Women vs. home

Themes of domestic life and the home reoccur throughout Louise Bourgeois's work. Early works on canvas and paper from the mid-1940s show a female figure trapped inside a small-scale house. While her room-like Cell structures often contain objects associated with the home. Bourgeois explores the role of female identity throughout her work, often challenging the conventional role of women in the twentieth century.

Fear and Anxieties

Louise Bourgeois began to make her self-enclosed structures known as Cells in 1989 and they became an important part of her output for many years. In these works she explores themes of being trapped, anguish and fear. The word 'cell' can refer to both an enclosed room, as in a prison; as well as the most basic elements of plant or animal life, as in the cells of the body. This is how Bourgeois decsribed how seh saw the Cells:

Each cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain... each cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at

Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000 houses a metal table on which a red fabric sculpture sits on a small pedestal. The fabric sculpture is of three screaming heads which are joined together. The three fused heads suggest Cerberus, the three-headed dog in Greek mythology. In depictions of Cerberus each head is often used to represent birth, youth, and old age. The cycle of life is a theme that Bourgeois often explored in her work.

Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) 1989-93, one of Bourgeois's first cells, has a large rough marble stone supported by steel girders at its centre. The stone has carved and polished black eyes that look up towards a large circular mirror. Other mirrors inside the cell look like dressing-table mirrors or oversized vanity mirrors. They suggest the idea of home. In the wire mesh ceiling the large round mirror is attached to a hinged circular panel. This can rotate to reflect different views of the interior. Walking around the sculpture is unnerving as the eyes and mirrors both confront and reflect you. Bourgeois wrote:

It is the quality of your eyes and the strength of your eyes that are expressed here. Nobody is going to keep me from seeing what is instead of what I would like

Through Cells (Eyes and Mirrors) Bourgeois invites us to think about reality and what reality means.

Found objects and meaning

Bourgeois's use of found objects in her Cells reflects the influence of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who she once referred to as a father figure. Duchamp first used found objects in the early twentieth century. He presented these objects as artworks, calling them his ' readymades '. But whereas Duchamp's selection of objects was about the idea of the object, Bourgeois's selection is rooted in memory and biography. The objects mean something to her.

Our own body could be considered, from a topological point-of-view, a landscape with mounds and valleys and caves and holes. So it seems rather evident to me that our body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.
Louise Bourgeois

From her earliest paintings to her later Cells and fabric works, Louise Bourgeois explores the human body. In the 1960s, the body forms and body parts in her sculptures became more organic, very different from earlier sculptures in both shape and the materials she used. She began to use materials such as latex, plaster, marble and bronze. She also used and repeated rounded forms suggestive of male and female genitals and breasts.

Tits 1967 is a small sculpture cast in bronze. The sculpture, as the title indicates, represents two breasts fused together to create a single bulbous form. This double, mirrored form is something that Bourgeois uses a lot in her work, and shows the influence of surrealism. Tits relates to Janus Fleuri 1968 where two stunted phalluses are joined back to back to create a sexualised form that suggests both male and female organs. Both Tits and Janus Fleuri point in opposite directions - the past and the future - suggesting the importance of the past to Bourgeois.

In sculptures such as these, Bourgeois used fragmented body parts to investigate complex emotional states. They appear regularly in Bourgeois's work and are often referred to as 'part-objects'. The term 'part-object' was first used by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her writings on the development of young children. In Klein's view, the first 'part-object' we encounter in life is our mother's breast. This idea of the 'part-object' has since often been used to describe sculptures by modern and contemporary artists that take the form of body parts in exploring sexuality, desire or questions of gender.

Have a go: Body hybrids

Collaborate with a friend or family member (or group) and play this drawing game.

Draw a head and neck on a piece of paper. Fold the paper so you hide your drawn head but leave a few marks that show where your drawn neck ends. Pass the paper to your collaborator to draw the body. They should then fold the paper again and pass it back to you (or on to the next person if you are in a group) to draw the legs. Pass the paper on again to draw the feet.

Unfold the drawing to find a hybrid body.

Now change the activity by adding some objects. Draw in a shoe or table or plant, instead of sections of the body, to see what happens.

This process of making drawings was invented by surrealist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. They called this process exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis in French). Other artists have since used the process to make unsettling drawings, including contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Explore the Chapmans's exquisite corpse drawings in Art & Artists.

The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a schild, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them ... Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by ringing her neck. The spiral - I love the spiral - represents control and freedom.
Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois first used the spiral form in the 1950s in two wooden sculptures and it often appears again in later works. For Bourgeois the form of the spiral comes from the twisting of tapestries in the River Bièvre when she worked as a child and young woman in the family business.

The spiral represents 'an attempt at controlling the chaos'. In the sculpture Nature Study 1986 a tightly coiled spiral morphs into a hand holding a human figure.

The spiral also suggests violence - the wringing of necks. In the hanging bronze sculpture Spiral Woman 1984 the figure is bound by a thick coil, with only her limbs visible. Trapped by the spiral she hangs in mid-air, suspended and spinning in a constant state of her own fragility.

Although the spiral can control chaos, there is always the underlying threat that the spiral will unravel.

In A l'infini 2008-9 spirals are present again. Here, the spiralling lines flow freely around representations of falling female bodies, disembodied limbs, a couple and childbirth. Interlocking etched ribbon-like lines in the multi-part work suggest a double helix - the spiral arrangement of the two strands of DNA that froms the basis for life itself. A l'infini refers to the endlessness of life. It abstractly puts across the idea of life as a journey, moving from birth, to youth, to relationship with a partner, and ultimately, to death. Birth, love, sexuality and death are an endless loop in the cycle of life.

The spiral can also be seen in a series of twelve woodcuts named Spirals from 2005. Some of the spirals are loose and sketchy while others are more tightly wound and even.

Friendship

When you are at the bottom of the well, you look around and say, who is going to get me out? In this case it is Jerry who comes and he presents a rope, and I hook myself on the rope and he pulls me out.
Louise Bourgeois, interveiw with Lawrence Rinder 9 May 1995, in Frances Morris (ed.) Louise Bougeois, 2007, p.150.

Jerry Gorovoy met Louise Bourgeois in the late 1970s and was her assistant and best friend for over thirty years. Bourgeois made lots of drawings and sculptures of Jerry Gorovoy's hands along with her own hands. She referred to these as intimate 'portraits'. The Welcoming Hands 1996, located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, is a bronze sculpture of her hands clutching those of Jerry's.

Bourgeois also depicted a representation of her friendship with Gorovoy in the multipart work 10 am Is When You Come To Me 2006. It consists of twenty hand-painted sheets that depict her hands and those of Gorovoy. The hands are mostly painted over printed musical score paper in red gouache paint. You can tell Bourgeois's hands by the wedding ring she wore. The title relates to the time Gorovoy would arrive at Bourgeois's studio or home to begin their daily routine working together.

Hands reoccur in many of Bourgeois's works, often as a symbol of being dependent on someone who supports you. Give or Take 2002 can be read as a commentary on the sometimes conflicted reliance of friendship. This sculpture presents a two-handed limb - one open, the other clasped - an object that is simultaneously gentle and cold.

Earlier in her career Bourgeois had also used friendship as inspiration. Personages 1946-55, are totem-like wooden sculptures that she grouped together to create installations. They depict individuals and Bourgeois's relationship with them, reflecting her homesickness and the people she left behind in Paris. Knife Couple 1949 is an example of these. Bourgeois often used her roof as a studio and the tall forms of the Personages suggest the skyscrapers and rooftops that surrounded her.

Writing and Recording

I love language... you can stand anything if you write it down... words put in connection can open up new relations... a new view of things.
Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois kept journals from a young age. Her childhood experiences were hoarded in her diaries and she continued to write and record her thoughts, activities and experiences throughout her life. As well as using the writing in her journals as a memory bank of ideas for her work, she also included text from her journals in her artworks.

In 1947 Louise Bourgeois produced a group of prints called He Disappeared into Complete Silence that combined poetic text with engravings. Bourgeois later combined words, phrases and drawing in her artworks, sometimes embroidering these onto cloth. The text she uses is aimed at the viewer and includes didactic (or preachy), ironic and sometimes moralising statements. These are either presented playfully, or, as critic Robert Storr says, 'with jarring psychological' bluntness.

In Repairs in the Sky 1999, one of a series of lead wall reliefs, the title of the work is engraved into the surface in capital letters. Around the text are five cavities, which resemble bullet holes that pierce into the lead. These have been 'repaired' with fabric and thread. Here, Bourgeois again combines opposing elements: the soft lead, thread and fabric are contrasted against steel, which has been hammered and distorted with the cavities and the text engraving.

In the woven fabric piece 2009, Bourgeois lists her fears as silence, the darkness, falling down, insomnia and emptiness. These are themes and anxieties that reoccur throughout her work. Bourgeois was an obsessive list-maker with a fascination for dictionaries and encyclopedias, perhaps because of their sense of completeness and certainty.

Bourgeois also kept three types of diaries. She described these as:

The written, the spoken (into a tape recorder), and my drawing diary, which is the most important. Having these diaries means that I keep my house in order.

Like drawing, writing was a compulsion for Bourgeois; her writings are a collection deeply personal thoughts and memories like her sculptures and drawings.

What do you think? Text and language

Think about these quotes by Louise Bourgeois and how they relate to her artworks.

Look at her use of language in artworks such as Home for Runaway Girls and . Identify when you feel she is being didactic (teaching or instructing us about something), ironic (sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek), or moralising.

Have a go: Words, motifs and narratives

Do you keep a diary or journal? Or do you write 'to do' lists or write things down that you want to remember?

Pick out phrases or words that are important from your writing.

How would you use these in an artwork to add meaning?

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Introduction With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.

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Art, Psychotherapy  and Psychosis_(Intro)

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Art, Psychotherapy  and Psychosis_(Intro)