撮影：田中直子

The revenge of the mother in

Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back. And Let Me Tell You, It Was Wonderful

Lyudmila Georgieva

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Louis Bourgeois’s Maman has been a landmark of Roppongi Hills since 1999—a nightmarish, towering spider imposing itself on the sleek, commercial landscape. For the artist, however, this was a figure not of horror but of nurture, closely linked to motherhood. Like a spider, the mother entangles her family in shared time and space. A signature of Bourgeois's work, Maman speaks through its physicality about care and confinement, trauma, and vulnerability.

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In 2024, the Mori Museum of Art opened the first retrospective of Louis Bourgeois in 27 years: Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back. And Let Me Tell You, It Was Wonderful. The exhibition similarly centered on raw materiality, family, and the artistic sublimation of trauma, showcasing 106 artworks across various genres. While Bourgeois worked across a wide range of media, she is primarily renowned as a sculptor, and the curation effectively supports this view. Every piece in the exhibition is approached in a sculptural manner that shapes the space around it.

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With a similarly clear curatorial perspective, the exhibition chose to present Bourgeois's more-than-five-decade-long career not through its chronological development but rather through a strong thematic narrative. The works are divided into three chapters, forming a visible dialectical progression. The first two chapters take a biographical approach to interpreting Bourgeois’s art. The first examines her relationship with her mother, marked by a fear of abandonment and anguish from her untimely death. The second looks at the simultaneous resentment and care she felt towards her father.

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The third chapter resolves this tension by expanding the perspective on Bourgeois's art through a methodological study. It explores the distinctive symbiosis of psychoanalysis, feminism, and artistic practice, through which Bourgeois constantly upholds the power of sublimation of the unconscious into art. Starting with the Surrealists post-World War I, most artistic explorations of the unconscious rely on desublimation—stripping away cultural transpositions and revealing the unconscious drives. Bourgeois’s firm belief in the power of artistic transformation, therefore, stands out.

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While two columns in between the chapters provide more historical perspective, the first, Fallen Women, notably showcases the famous Femme Maison early series; most of the pieces on display are made in the final decade of Bourgeois’s life, after 2000. As a consequence, works with similar formal and thematic characteristics are spread throughout the space. Again and again, the viewer encounters distorted and fragmented bodies, nudes enmeshed in an embrace, body parts in various states of attachment, infants still feeding from their mothers, and hanging heads in confined rooms.

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Working within sublimation doesn’t hinder Bourgeois's artistic language, which bursts with organic materiality, unabashed (though not necessarily erotic) sexuality, and a willingness to forgo beauty in favor of eerie depictions of life. Due to the repetitions, there seems to be no formal progression—only a deeper understanding of the surroundings. Like a repeated disturbance of the artist's trauma, the exhibition traps viewers in an uncanny world, forcing them to face the disturbing bodies that populate it.

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The first room of the exhibition marks the transition into Bourgeois’s surreal, dark universe. It features sculptures of exaggerated and absurd bodies at the center, surrounded by three wall projections (by Jenny Holzer) displaying Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic impressions on family and human connection, moving from bottom to top. These moving white letters create a sense of disorientation, stunning the viewer. The works—a double-handed arm, double-ended penis, two-faced head—intensify the impression of flesh distorted and defiant of its surroundings.

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Louise Bourgeois was one of the first artists to be exhibited under the label of abjection at the landmark 1993 Whitney exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. The term, popularized by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), refers to the anxiety, repulsion, and horror evoked by encounters with objects or experiences—such as blood, dirt, or death—that disrupt the boundaries of subjectivity. When introduced into art practice and criticism in the early 1990s, abjection became closely tied to feminism, manifesting as representations of the female body as deformed and repulsive, assaulted by patriarchal society. Within this framework, Bourgeois’s exploration of the feminine body as both a site of trauma and resistance stands out as particularly significant.

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Bourgeois's exploration of abjection aligns closely with Kristeva’s theory. For both, the mother’s body is the primal site of abjection, rejected when the infant asserts its subjecthood in the act of separation. For both, this process is difficult and deeply traumatic. For both, the mother is vital yet threatening.

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Opening the first chapter of the exhibition, dedicated to the child-mother relationship, is a sculpture titled The Good Mother (2008). A woman is giving her milk away in five streams (for Bourgeois, the number five symbolizes the family). The figure is simultaneously submissive—kneeling with a downcast gaze–yet her strained pose and flowing milk exude strength and will. The nurture symbolized by the milk is combined with pain and exploitation, as well as power and might. Throughout the exhibition, the female breast emerges as a crystallized image. Bourgeois' bodies are consistently covered in spherical forms. Resembling breasts or wombs, however, there is also a similarity to throbbing tumors or soars. 

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In the depictions of obsessive motherhood, the exhibition reaches its full potential of abjection.The Good Mother is followed by figurines and diagrams depicting Bourgeois’ difficult childbirth, which she attributes to her son’s reluctance to separate from her body. Next, the viewer enters a sectioned-off room titled Feeding, where a series of white and pink gestural paintings (gouache on paper) portray a fetus coming to full life within the womb. The repeating colors and images on the four walls envelop the viewer, sucking the air out of the already small space. Over and over, the paintings show the unborn child engulfed in the mother’s body, feeding off her indistinct flesh. Through sculptural, three-dimensional curation, Feeding creates a visceral sense of confinement, evoking a terror of being engulfed by the mother’s body, detained and passively nurtured until the distinction between the self and their surroundings disappears. 

The power of Bourgeois’ depictions of motherhood stems from the constantly shifting perspective between mother and child. The viewer is thus made to empathize both with the exploitation of the mother’s body and with the infant’s painful metamorphosis into a full-fledged subject. 

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Bourgeois portrays the mother as embodying both love and dread. Her famous installation, The Destruction of the Father (1974), imagines a family dinner where the patriarch is dissected and eaten, while breast-like spheres once again line the floor and hang from the ceiling. The work subverts Freud’s myth of the origin of society, where the tyrannical father is killed by his sons, and his rule is abstracted into law. The Destruction of the Father portrays the killing not as a rational act of justice but as revenge. In the same room is La Filette (1968) – a singular latex sculpture of a flayed penis, its pushed-back skin revealing bubbling flesh underneath, tender and in need of (mother’s) care.

In its dialectical progression, the exhibition articulates Bourgeois’ critique of the psychoanalytic structure where the abjection of the maternal becomes a necessary cultural act. In psychoanalysis, this is symbolized by the distinction between the mother tongue, singular and held within the body, and the father’s language, shared and culturally productive. Bourgeois’ constant insistence on the mother aims to elevate the mother tongue in rejection of patriarchal domination, both familial and cultural. The patriarch is killed and eaten as revenge, while his penis is left defenseless—hung and flayed.

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This revolt is not a regression to a pre-subjective, infant state. Instead, Bourgeois recuperates the feminine’s cultural power by refuting the necessity of the abjection of the mother’s female body. In other words, Bourgeois argues for the cultural potency of the mother tongue.

Subverting one of psychoanalysis' core tenets of societal and individual development, Bourgeois' art transcends the male-female divide, avoiding a mere reversal. In the first chapter, the mother gathers the family within her body, while in the second, the father’s power is sacrificed. The third section of the exhibition breaks this tension.

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The works in the third chapter are less autobiographical and more analytical. They include Sublimation (2002), in which Bourgeois directly engages with psychoanalysis and outlines her method of artistic sublimation, and Ode à l'Oubli (2002), a collection of 35 fabric illustrations that pay tribute to the artist’s childhood in France and her family’s textile business. This section also features the vitrine Conscious and Unconscious—two structures, one rationally constructed and the other woven through five separate threads—representing an apotheosis of Bourgeois' belief in the productive power of the unconscious transformed in the artistic process.

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As revolting as they can be, Bourgeois’ sculptures do not remain within the unconscious or the pre-subjective, natural state. On the contrary, she unrelentlessly argue for the possibility of the sublimation of the mother tongue into culture. Language, art, writing, philosophy, all usually associated with the father realm, are conveyed in Bourgeois art through the female, usually the mother’s body, refuting her necessary abjection in the process of subjectivation. 

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Series of Bourgeois’ sculptures could be described as contained chaos. The most striking of them is probably The Couple (2006), a towering aluminum sculpture, featuring two intertwined, spiralized bodies locked into an embrace.  For Bourgeois, the spiral symbolized the interplay of dual forces, embodying a tense dynamic between freedom and control. The cultural emerges not as an imposed boundary or patriarchal hierarchy, but as a fragile structure that barely contains—and channels upwards—an otherwise destructive energy. This strenuous containment also appears in Bourgeois’ soft sculptures—bodies and body parts (mostly heads) stitched from fabric pieces. Though on the verge of bursting, they remain intact, held together by the threads of the artist’s imagination. In both cases, the chaotic force of nature, previously unassimilable and thus expulsed, is made productive through artistic form.

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In the parallel of moving beyond the male-female simplified divide, the last section of the exhibition also moves away from the somewhat reductive interpretation of Bourgeois’ art through autobiographical accounts of trauma.

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Similarly to moving beyond the simplistic separation of male and female, in its last chapter, the exhibition also moves away from the reductive interpretation of Bourgeois’ art as autobiographical accounts of trauma. Perhaps that’s also the reason why more recent works were predominantly chosen for the retrospective. Through the achieved balance, they better showcase Bourgeois’ distinctive understanding of psychoanalysis and her specific approach to feminism. The resolved dialectical tension, the achieved precarious balance between trauma and sublimation, mother and child, female and male, asserts Bourgeois’ unique artistic approach and deserved place in art history.

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Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.
2024.9.25 [Wed] - 2025.1.19 [Sun]

https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/bourgeois/