Louise Bourgeois: Ma Maison à Easton

The neatly ordered jars set in the oak cupboard were a great comfort to LouiseBourgeois in the summer of 1942. Food rationing had begun that same year as theSecond World War heavily burdened US supply chains. Government posters encouragedwomen to preserve local harvests and help feed their families, but Louise did more thanset up food storage. She literally preserved the image of her kitchen pantry, andcaptured that moment in time through the lines and colors of her printmaking. Withinher design, she reveals something of herself with the symbolic use of red-a color thatsignaled complex emotions for the artist.

Bourgeois, Louise, During the War: Shortage of Food in Easton, 1942-44, woodcut onpaper, © The Easton FoundationAs a new mother of three young boys, she had all the concerns one would expect of aparent facing economic challenges, only for her, there were added anxieties: thetraumatic memories of her childhood and the horrors she witnessed during the FirstWorld War in France. On top of deep seated fears of harm and abandonment were layersof guilt and shame at having left behind her family and friends in Europe. Here inConnecticut, she found a measure of safety that allowed her to reflect on these feelingsand use the creative process to liberate herself from the disquiet that plagued her.Often, she would sit at the kitchen table for hours carving into wood with a small knifecreating blocks for printing and sculptural forms. Her sons would marvel at how sheworked with her hands as diligently as any typical mother might have been knitting.Louise however, was no ordinary woman and the many fantastical forms she createdover the course of her seventy year career in art seem to have had their beginnings inthe peaceful solitude of her family’s summer home in Easton.

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise was a bright and creative young woman whose earlyartistic skills developed in her parent’s repair shop where she would draw replacementfigures for damaged tapestries. She grew up in a household that had a certain amountof privilege and wealth but with it came sadness and distrust. Her father, described as aserial philanderer, was deeply disappointed that she was not born a boy. His capriciousnature had a lasting impact on Louise and she often drew a contrast between hermother’s calm intellect and her father’s raw emotional outbursts. This duality, betweenintelligence and emotion, carried over in Louise.

Initially enrolled for a degree in mathematics at the Sorbonne, she switched her courseof study to the arts after her mother’s death in 1932. At 21 years of age, she wasattending studio classes for painting, sculpture and print making in some of the mostprestigious schools in Paris. Resourceful and eager to engage with artists, she served asa translator for English speaking students as payment for her participation. It was an

amazing time to be a student in the City of Lights: Louise was in contact with some ofthe most significant figures in the art world and was engaging with all the major stylisticmovements from that period, particularly, Symbolism and Surrealism.

In 1938 she met and married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and theymoved to New York. Between Louise’s artistic breadth and Robert’s innovative scholarlywork on modern abstract art, their home became a social haven for many artists fleeingNazism. Surrounded by intellectuals discussing politics and the latest artistic trends, shewas enthralled by the creative energy and the dynamic city around her. She attendedclasses at the Art Student League and tried to break into the exhibition scene, all thewhile, fulfilling her role as the wife of an important scholar. She kept home, hostedparties and raised their growing family, often taking her work to the rooftop of theirapartment building for lack of space.

Louise Bourgeois with her sculpture, “The Visitors Arrive at the Door,” on the roof of herapartment building, Stuyvesant’s Folly, 142 East 18th Street, circa 1944, © The EastonFoundationWhile she had some success exhibiting her art, she was frustrated with trying to findbalance in her life. Working out this conflict in imagery, Louise painted a series offemale nudes with houses on their heads. Titled Femme Maison, literally “WomanHouse,” it was a clever play on the term “housewife.” For Louise, home was a mode ofsecurity and shelter, but it was also a confining prison with all the familialresponsibilities that vied for her attention. In this series of works, the facial features ofthe female are completely hidden by the architectural structure. While somecontemporary male critics praised these paintings as examples of women proudlydisplaying their domesticity, feminists in subsequent generations accurately sawLouise’s commentary on the tensions that pull women between traditional and modernroles obscuring their identity.

Bourgeois, Louise, Femme Maison, 1945-47, oil and ink on linens,© The Easton FoundationLouise continued to produce works in the years that followed but she was not widelyrecognized or seen in many exhibits. Despite this lack of attention from the main streamart world, she went on creating and even teaching for decades. By the 1970’s, there wasan increased appreciation of her work and her career had a resurgence that lead to agroundbreaking solo retrospective at the MOMA in 1982. Significantly, Louise was thefirst female to have her own sculptural show at this museum. Though she was alreadyseventy years old, her new level of success encouraged her to pursue larger and morecomplex works and installations.

Louise revisited the theme of Femme Maison in marble but she became increasinglyinterested in houses themselves and their role as points of memory. She began a seriesof life-sized Cells that were rooms filled with artifacts of daily life, architecturalfragments and sculptural elements. While most male artists did not engage with thesubject of domestic spaces, Louise saw that dwellings are an important reflection of ourpersonal experience; within our walls and rooms, everyday life runs the entire range ofhuman emotion.

Bourgeois, Louise, Ma Maison à Easton, “My House in Easton,” 2007. Etching,watercolor, pencil additions on paper.© The Easton FoundationIt is curious to note that the brownstone in New York City where she resided for overfifty years is rarely depicted in her artwork. After her husband‘s death in 1973, theentire building, with the exception of his personal library, served as both her home andstudio: sculptures occupied all free space with writings and images covering the walls.In effect, her NYC home became a work of art in itself. In contrast, her home in Eastonwas a frequent subject in her paintings and sculpture. Originally a barn, Louise and herhusband purchased their Center Road residence in April 1941. Here, the family wouldspend their summers and occasionally weekends. Louise needed the quiet and calm ofthis rural setting to balance the frenetic pace of her life in the city. More importantly, itwas an opportunity for her children to engage with the natural world. She believed thatthis time spent in the country was a critical part of their relationship and the process ofsharing discoveries in this environment helped their education.

Engaging with the outdoors as much as possible, she planted dozens of boxwoodsaround the property for their sculptural potential. She also made careful studies ofplants, animals and even insects.

Bourgeois, Louise, Connecticutiana, c. 1944-45, Oil on Wood, Crystal Bridges Museum ofAmerican Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2014.21Many of the compositions from this time include organic forms pared down to almostgeometric essentials and rendered in a grid pattern. This superimposed structure

helped her analytical mind organize and control the abundant new information. Thisprocess is exemplified in her piece Connecticutiana, which has at its core the silhouetteof her country house.

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Easton‘s wildlife for Louise was its spiders. Shewas fascinated by these delicate creatures. She noted that those living in her house andin the neighboring trees spun their webs like the tapestry weavers in her family. Shealso expressed her gratitude to these benevolent creatures because they helped reducethe swarms of mosquitoes her family endured in the summer months. Surviving sketchesdating to as early as 1947 depict spiders and spider-like armatures that she would revisitdecades later and translate into monumental bronze and steel. The great Maman, or“Mom” sculptures express the protective and creative qualities of arachnids, but as withall her work, deeper meaning links them to emotions and memory. These enormoussculptures were in fact a symbolic portrait of her mother who she described as her bestfriend because “she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle,indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.”

Left: Bourgeois, Louise, Untitled, ink and charcoal on tan paper, © The Easton

Foundation Right: Bourgeois, Louise, Maman, 1999, Long Museum (West Bund),Shanghai, 2018Louise’s Maman sculptures propelled her to international fame and her works of art cannow be seen in museums around the world. While she remained very active andexhibited well into her nineties, during her final years she remained mostly in herChelsea home in New York City. Suffering from agoraphobia, she described herself as“no longer traveling in space, but only in time.” She began a series of cartographiccompositions in which she reflected on her unique life journey. Within these works, sheuses the outlines of preexisting maps to chart her memories and associations withsignificance places. In her Map of Connecticut and Long Island, the vibrant red coloringof the Hudson River and the coastline of the Long Island Sound is matched by theconcentric red circles marking the location of Easton.

Bourgeois, Louise, Map of Connecticut and Long Island, 2001. Engraving, etching onpaper, © The Easton FoundationThe swirl she uses here to denote her Connecticut home was another importantreoccurring element throughout her career. Spirals were a means of unwinding the pastand coping with memories. Twisting shapes recalled the washing and wringing of fabricsand they symbolize nature’s cycles of birth and rebirth. Paired with the red flowing riverin her drawing, which embodies the passage of time, the spiral functions in her map as athread that joins together the past and present.

It is important to recognize as well that she saw spirals as a metaphor for permanence ina fleeting world. When describing her own character in interviews, she was proud toidentify consistency as one of her better qualities. Looking back on her life, despitesetbacks, she never gave up. She also saw herself as unwaveringly honest, with othersand with herself. In essence, the spiral in these autobiographical maps represents Louiseand serves as a symbolic self-portrait.

Clearly, in her later years, her Easton home and the memories it contained were at theforefront of her mind and heart. She addressed the importance of this location not onlyin her art work but in the preparations she made for her legacy. When considering aname for the non-profit art charity she founded in 1984, Louise christened it the EastonFoundation. Located in the New York City brownstone where she lived and worked untilher death in 2010 at the age of 98, its mission is to preserve her art and offeropportunities for scholarship. Though it is currently closed and undergoing thepreservation and cataloging of its extensive archives, it seems quite certain that Louiseintended to weave a strong link between these two homes for posterity.