Sing out Louise or Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise or My God what a great exhibition I just saw.
Today I took in and took advantage of the member’s preview of the superb and extraordinary exhibition "Louise Bourgeois: An unfolding portrait." The beautifully installed show features over 200 works mostly from the Moma’s collection but there are also some loans here and there. It starts in the God awful atrium the space we love to hate and continues on the 3rd floor where it is intimate in its approach and installation.
The exhibition consists mostly of Louise’s prints and books but also includes some drawings, paintings and sculptures my favorites being her early wood totem like pieces that are nicely represented here.
But the bulk of the show is made up of her remarkable prints and etchings very large to small including her prints on fabrics that are so beautiful and luscious, I thought I would pee my pants from the sheer beauty of them, and how much I would have loved to look through and handle her fabric books.
Her career was long and sometimes magical but by and large she was ignored for a very long time, please see my remembrance at the bottom of the post for more on this, but she persisted through thin and thick and her long and creative life should be not only a blessing for us, but also a lesson as well.
All her themes are represented including her long long look at bodies in all their beauty and horror as well as works touching on nature, abstraction and architecture which also touch on autobiography. This is a great show and one of my favorite art experiences of 2017. It also puts to shame much of the crap that is being shown in the galleries of Chelsea and elsewhere and being praised in the pages of The New York Times and other houses of ill repute that make me want to puke. The link I’m including is for the website that has 100’s of her works from the Moma’s archive. Oh and a note to the Moma weary. Construction is moving fast here now, I think they are building another borough or a small city inside their gates and on top of the usual chaos of this deep dish shit hole be prepared for even more than the usual annoyances. I’m just saying.
A remembrance of Louise,originally published a few years back on my blog along with a cameo by another famous woman artist.
“Bourgeois as many people know is 96 and has been making art forever or maybe it just seems that way. In the early 1970’s she could be seen everywhere, at gallery openings, at art world parties in the streets and galleries of Soho, and nobody gave a shit about her or her work, not critics, other artists or dealers. Embraced by the feminists and their critics but ignored by everyone else she plugged away. Her invisibility changed when the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective in 1982, which came as a great surprise to some, and suddenly she was a hot art world commodity. Go figure, but good for her anyway. I’m all for the recognition of neglected artists, especially since I might be one of them myself. In the early 70’s I was at a small dinner party given by two art world friends and Louise was one of the guests. Also at the dinner was Alice Neel who was the complete opposite of Louise. I don’t recall Louise saying much at dinner that night. She was quiet and small, demure and somewhat shy I thought, but next to Neel, anyone would seem quiet and demure. Alice started yakking the minute she wobbled in and didn’t stop talking, mainly about herself the whole night. At one point she turned to me and asked who I was. When I told her that I was an artist, she turned away from me, and went on talking about herself. Louise of course knew my work as I was showing my art and myself quite a lot in the early and mid 70’s. I liked Louise and wish that I had gotten to know her better when I had the chance.”
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