Restless mind

Bourgeois grew up in provincial France, but moved with her American husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, to New York in 1938. It was there that her artistic career really began, though the complexion of her art remains resolutely European and looks back constantly to the country of her birth. The show opens with a group of 1940s paintings which explore the idea of the housewife, taking the word literally and making images which are half-woman and half-house. At once an enduring theme emerges: of containment and entrapment. The woman hides in the house, but also outgrows it; her body is part building which traps her, part temple which

adorns her. Although these paintings are effective, it was towards sculpture that Bourgeois gravitated from the late-1940s, in order to make her art more real. In this first room is a much later environment or ‘cell’, a pink marble palace in a cage. It incorporates a guillotine blade ready to fall: the anxiety that hallmarks Bourgeois’s work is blatantly but economically expressed.

Subtlety is not a keynote of this work, though ambiguity is. Her hybrid imagery draws heavily upon the surrealist strategy of juxtaposition (she plays an inspired game of Exquisite Corpse with the mismatching of body parts), and alternates fruitfully between flesh and landscape, body and architecture. In the same way she uses a wide variety of materials, from plaster, latex and wax to marble and bronze, as well as found objects. Bourgeois is not interested in crowd-pleasing, and for a time in her early career even withdrew from exhibiting, though she does enjoy the attention her work now receives. She draws all the time, and an early suite of nine engravings (made with the master-etcher S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17 when it was in New York) called ‘He Disappeared into Complete Silence’ (1947), shows how important the discipline and lucidity of line is to her thought. A group of totemic wooden sculptures, like daggers or paddles or primitive African carvings (a specialism of her husband), in the second room of the exhibition, shows how her sculptural ideas were concurrently developing. Next come the impressive stacked ‘Personages’ (much akin to Brancusi) and the striking pink geometric sculpture ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’, assembled from leftover beams.