Restless mind

For once a major blockbuster exhibition at the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this age of confession and determinedly autobiographical art — for her troubled childhood. Whereas most artists of this type foist their traumas on us raw, Bourgeois cooks hers to a turn. What is more, she has the imagination and creative vision to translate and transform her source material, transcending its personal impetus and making it universal. As we know from the plethora of bloody breast-beating that passes for art among so many of today’s younger artists, the ability to transform experience is rare. In Bourgeois we have an adept of the art, with a restless and eclectic imagination, and capacity for a fertile invention. This display, spanning seven decades, represents a towering achievement.

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.