We're here in the Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art.
My name is Deborah Wye and I'm the Chief Curator Emerita of Prints and Illustrated Books, here
at the Museum.
And the display that you're looking at in the Atrium is part of an exhibition called
“Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait.”
It begins here in the atrium and extends up into the third floor galleries.
It's bittersweet for me to have done this exhibition since Louise died in 2010, it would've
been wonderful to have her here to see it, but I knew she couldn't live forever.
But in the first exhibition that we did in 1982, she used to come in on the weekends
and move things around, and the guards would try to stop her and she’d say
"But I'm the artist!"
I decided to put a recording of her voice at the entrance of the exhibition, where she's
singing a song that she wrote, and it's a kind of funny rap song with French words,
about the power of men and women and the fact that men have more power than women.
I hear her voice and I think she's here.
So, it's a nice touch for me.
Can you hear Louise?
That makes me really happy.
Oh, and here's a picture of her at the printing press.
That printing press was in the basement of her brownstone in Chelsea, which was her home
studio and she had two printing presses down there.
And she also had a table for a seamstress that she employed full-time with two sewing
machines to work on her fabric works, so her home on 20th Street really became a workshop,
just like her mother had had that workshop for tapestries.
We're in the section of the exhibition devoted to architecture and we call it “Architecture
Embodied.”
And the whole exhibition is divided into thematic sections.
I call them “visual metaphors” that Bourgeois came back to again and again.
She was motivated by emotional struggles and she came up with a visual imagery that would
help her deal with these emotional struggles.
So, architecture is very solid and she saw it as source of strength and something that
would be stable for her.
It wasn't just the building, this was a person or a symbol of a person.
So, if you saw a skyscraper like this by itself, that meant it was a lonely person.
If you saw two beside each other, that was a couple.
And since they were separated, they were probably estranged.
This is the way she would talk about this imagery.
You see a third one, and she says, "That's a triangle."
There's a lot of jealousy going on here.
She calls the texts in this book parables and they're wonderful stories.
Sometimes they're about loneliness—there’s one about a girl who went on a date and she
was stood up.
Another one's about a son who leaves his mother and slams the door and never comes back.
Another one's about a person who loses his hearing and then becomes isolated because
of that.
And another one's very violent about a husband who cuts up his wife and cooks her into a
stew and serves her at a dinner party.
Here she was a struggling artist and she thought by making an illustrated book and making
an edition of over fifty, she could distribute this book and get well known.
It was like a way to get known in the art world, but it turned out that it wasn't a
success at all, and only a few of them were ever really sold.
When she made the book “He Disappeared Into Complete Silence,” the buildings that she
depicted hinted at sculptures that she would make soon.
And once she started making sculpture, she stopped making paintings and printings or
prints all together.
She just really devoted herself to sculpture, because she said that sculpture was much more
tangible and that she could feel her emotions much more vividly in sculpture.
This is a sculpture called “Portrait of Jean-Louis,” and that's a portrait of her son.
And at this point, Bourgeois was traveling in pretty elevated intellectual and cultural
circles in New York.
Her husband, Robert Goldwater, was a very highly respected art historian.
And some of the people she associated with were architects, including Le Corbusier, who she befriended.
And Le Corbusier is known for an architectural feature of “piloti,” which is like stilts.
And you see them everywhere.
A building that's raised and has columns at the bottom, like pillars and then the glass
box rises above it.
So, here I think she's making reference to Le Corbusier with these two legs.
Years later, talking about this sculpture, she said, "I wanted my son to be as beautiful
as the skyscrapers here."
So, it's very touching.
We're now in the section of the exhibition called “Fabric of Memory,” and I mentioned
that Bourgeois was raised in a family of tapestry restorers.
But she didn't turn to fabric for her work until she was in her 80s, and that was in the 1990s.
She never like to throw anything away and her assistant had said something that I think
rings really true, and that is he said that she probably thought that if she started to
make sculptures out of all these old clothes, then they could never be thrown away.
And one of the prides of the MoMA collection is this fabric book called “Ode à l'Oubli,”
or “Ode to Forgetting.”
And what she did, is she folded the hand towels in two and sewed them at the binding, and
then she filled them with fabric collages.
And we've here put examples of these fabric collages here on the walls.
And these collages are made up of bits of her old garments.
And by putting them in the book, it becomes like a scrapbook, like a memory book.
Like, she could look at any particular page and remember, "Oh, I might've worn that dress
to such and such, a party," or "That was the scarf I got for Christmas from my husband."
I'm just making up those examples but I think that's the way she felt about them.
In this case, we're really lucky because we had Louise Bourgeois herself, turning the
pages of a book.
Oh, I think she's getting to the end of the book, she does something very sweet here.
You'll see what she does.
She points to her name at the end of the book.
In printmaking, a composition is developed in stages.
An artist will work on a copperplate, ink it up, run it through the press, look at a
sheet of paper, see how he or she likes it, then maybe want to make some additions.
They'll work more on the copperplate, ink it up again, put a piece of paper on,
run it through the press.
And they do this many times and all those pieces of paper survive.
And so you can see how an artist's imagination unfolded and that's actually why I came up
with the title of the show "An Unfolding Portrait," but I also wanted to show that sculpture drawings
and paintings are also involved with this.
In this group of works, Bourgeois started with this sculpture.
So, after Bourgeois did the sculpture, she decided to make a print of the same motif.
So then she ran out to the press and she got a couple of proofs, and she started to work on them.
And here, she added inside the glow, sitting on the chair, a mother attached by an umbilical
cord to a baby.
And she continued to develop that to these different stages of the print.
And then she decides on this one on fabric, a black version.
And she initials it on embroidery LB.
And then she decides to make another sculpture, this time with a mother and child connected
by an umbilical cord within the glass jar.
So, it's a very interesting way to see how an artist thinks, going from one medium to
the other in developing her imagery.
So, I hope that this exhibition makes clear to all the visitors, how important printmaking
was to Bourgeois and how integral it was to her practice overall.
And I was the print curator here at the Museum of Modern Art.
I actually worked at MoMA for thirty-one years before I retired in 2010.
And then from 2010 till now, I've been working on this Louise Bourgeois catalog raisonné
and this exhibition and accompanying book.
But the reason for all that attention to Bourgeois' prints, is that in 1990 she decided to make
an archive of her prints here at MoMA.
So at that point, she gave all the prints that she then had in her possession.
And she said that, going forward, she would promise to give us one example of every print
she made after that.
So, that's how we amassed such a large collection because she lived for two more decades, nearly
two more decades, yeah, two more decades up until 2010 and printmaking was one of her
major activities during that period.
So now, we have about three thousand prints in MoMA's collection.
And it's an incredibly unique resource for study and exhibition.
And behind here are just the kind of examples of what we have, both the evolving states
as she developed her imagery, as well as the final composition that she decided to issue in an edition.