Louise Bourgeois at the Mori Art Museum

The work of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is primal. Primal attachment and primal fear, harking back to her childhood, are intertwined in the tapestry of her work, sometimes literally, inseparable and inevitable. The mother is a smothering, fearsome spider (have you ever noticed that in our stories of dread the spider is always female?), and the angry, vengeful father is constantly on the verge of committing some kind of violence. Both are often reduced to their primal functions; mother becomes a predator with breasts, father is reduced to his sexual organs. Freud would have a field day, as they say, if only Bourgeois, who throughout her life spent countless hours in therapy, would let him.

Bourgeois’s art, whether in painting or in sculpture, alternatively hard and soft,  is a testament to the fact that most great art comes from pain, and the new exhibition of Bourgeois’s oeuvre at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, her first retrospective in Japan in 27 years, does a commendable job of highlighting the constant internal tension the artist spent her life in, which has resulted in some of the most impactful art of the 20th Century. The exhibition’s subtitle, “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.” after one of the works featured in the show could not have been chosen more perfectly.

Over one hundred of her works, many of which are presented in Asia for the first time, are organized over three chapters. The first one, Do Not Abandon Me, about her tortured relationship with her chronically ill mother, is perhaps the most poignant of the three. The fear of abandonment ran deep in Bourgeois, as evidenced in sculptures like The Reticent Child. One of the most poignantly displayed works from this chapter is a 1993 sculpture, Arch of Hysteria, a male torso made of polished bronze suspended from the ceiling in a backwards arch, for which her studio assistant was the model. It is beautifully displayed all on its own in a hall from which you can see a Tokyo panorama, including Mount Fuji.

Chapter 2, I Have Been to Hell And Back, deals with the artist’s own emotions of anxiety, guilt, jealousy, as well as her suicidal impulses. Here, her troubled relationship with her father is unleashed as art. One tableau from 1974 is a deep red bulbous mess. Its title, The Destruction of the Father, tells all. Another sculpture, Shredder, is equally terrifying, a bottom half of a female form lays in front of an enormous set of wooden wheels that are about to run over it.

Chapter 3, Repairs in the Sky, is an attempt at sublimating Bourgeois’s pain, and bringing it into some kind of balance. That art could provide catharsis has always been an artist’s hope. In the case of Bourgeois that hope is faint, but it’s hope nonetheless.

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“Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.” At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, through January 19th, 2025. All images courtesy of the museum.