Welcome to the Museum of Modern Art.
Here we are on the third floor in front of "Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait."
My name is Sewon Kang and I'm the curatorial assistant helping Debbie Wai to curate the
show.
Louise Bourgeois was a French-born, American artist.
She was first trained as a painter and a printmaker.
And she only started to make sculpture in the '30s and '40s, when she moved to New York
with her American husband, the well-regarded art historian, Robert Goldwater.
She was just enamored with the skyscrapers of New York.
She was just thrilled by their verticality.
That they were monuments to human achievement was really exciting to her.
And so she started to make these very anthropomorphized works that harken to the skyscrapers that
were all around her.
Louise Bourgeois was most well known for her sculptures, her large-scale spiders and cells.
But with this exhibition, we're trying to show a lesser-known part of her practice,
which is the prints and the books.
But first, a drawing from the '40s.
This is called "Sainte Sébastienne," and you can see it's a similar feel as the totems
you saw in the other room.
Saint Sebastian was an early Christian martyr and saint, and in the Renaissance, he started
to be depicted as this perfect, young man being impaled with arrows.
And in this moment of, maybe, his death he's in incredible pain.
You see he's, sort of like, in this agony and this ecstasy.
He's just perishing.
He's been taken up as a subject by a lot of different artists because of this, sort of,
non-normative depiction of desire and death.
But Louise Borgeois, in particular, was interested in it as a depiction of pain.
And so she called this "Sainte Sébastienne," because she wanted to feminize this very famous
or historical trope.
This is the same subject, "Sainte Sébastienne," that she did in the '90s.
So you see here that the figures come back into the work with exaggerated features, so
you don't have any doubts that it's a woman version of the saint.
And it's done in the printmaking technique, drypoint.
And what's particularly fun and interesting about her making, is that you can see how
an artist's imagination unfolds.
That's where the title of the exhibition comes from actually.
It was a very generative medium for her in this way.
She loved working on the same image again and again, and so each one became a different
exploration of the same topic.
She likened the arrows to antagonisms, to criticisms that she received, and that's where
this angry cat face comes out.
It's, sort of, her mask, her protection.
So this wall is all working proofs.
And then the final products are over here.
So these are two versions of the same image that Louise ended up editioning.
And, in this example, it's stamped with the metal sealing stamp of her father.
And she talked a lot about how her father was very antagonistic toward her, that he
criticized her all the time, embarrassing her in front of their guests.
And it really affected her.
So in the second version, she's created her own metal sealing stamp.
She and her father shared the same initials.
His name was Louis, and she was named Louise.
Actually, they were expecting a son and her mom named her Louise, because she wanted
to endear the child, who wasn't a boy, to her father.
But in contrast to her father's metal sealing stamp, which is very hard to read, this calligraphic
LB, Louise's is much more geometric, much more legible.
And she did that because she said she wanted to be readable.
She wanted people to understand her.
And she said that, "If people understood me, they couldn't help but love me."
So here you see three eggs in this very strange and elaborate hairdo.
She said that those were her three sons.
And, of course, she made this in the '90s.
Her sons were very much grown, and yet she was looking to protect them from the criticisms
that she received herself.
And in this very large version you see here, you see that she's failed.
She loses her head because she can't withstand all of the pain of the antagonisms.
And she likened these lines in the woman's form to tree rings.
Saint Sebastian, in traditional renderings, is usually tied to a tree, and so you see
here that the woman has become the tree.
So these works are all from the '90s, when she was an 80-year old woman.
She is highly prolific.
She was making art until the very last days of her life when she died at 98.
But I also wanna show you this earlier work that's very much related to these
works from the '90s.
So this is a self-portrait, another self-portrait of Louise as a "bird woman."
And you see again the three eggs in the bowl.
That's, again, her three sons.
And in contrast to the "Sainte Sébastienne" works, this is a really happy scene.
And you can tell it's a happy scene, because of her beautiful long hair and because of
her pearl necklace.
Those were recurring motifs in her life.
And so you can see she's in a very good mood in this image, but she described
it in a way that reminds you of her pain and that the subject of pain was the business
she was in.
That's what she said.
She said that she's ready to protect her eggs, but if she needs to, she can also take flight.
If she needs to get away, she can make a getaway.
So since I've only been able to show you a small portion of the works in the exhibition,
I hope you'll come in to the museum to see it yourself.
And please check out "Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books," which is the
online catalog of all of her works in the medium.
And we hope you'll check out the YouTube channel to learn more about Louise Bourgeois and other
happenings at the museum.