Louise Bourgeoise Essay

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I was fortunate enough to have been able to see Louise Bourgeois’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City, in 2008. The show was astonishing! Bourgeois’s pieces worked well with the architecture of the Guggenheim - both with their twists and spirals. I would have loved to spend a a week or a lifetime surrounded by her work. I personally loved the Personages and the Cells. Bourgeois' Personages were her first pieces that made me stare, think and pay attention. I was never a big fan of sculptures. But I must say, Louise’s Personages doesn’t need an explanation - the sculptures speaks for itself.
Bourgeois’s work of art moved me, I was even more enthralled when I read about her life and the process of creating her work - the love, emotions, life experiences that went into her art. When she exhibited her Personages for the first time she wanted them attached directly to gallery floor, not on pedestals, she wanted them arranged like a cocktail party with some close together and some alone since most of her work deals with physical closeness or isolation. Bourgeois wanted the gallery visitors to be able to walk among the pieces. Personages are simple, abstract figures, most of them between five and six feet tall, painted black, white or red, they suggest totems or African art.
“For the record. Bourgeois hates the word totem’ but it is unavoidable in as much as her work suggest the parallel on psychoanalytic grounds, involving the familial dynamic of ‘totem’ and ‘taboo’, as well as on formal.”1
Bourgeois’s Personages have been described as classic forms of Freudian mourning. She is said to have treated Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brancusi as artistic father figures whom she admires in order to negate them aggressively.2
Before she moved to New York from Paris, Bourgeois experienced the African influence that was currently

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