Louise Bourgeois Ageing and Maternal Bodies Rosemary Betterton

93 Louise Bourgeois, ageing,
and maternal bodies

Rosemary Betterton
abstract
This article explores late works by contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois that
illuminate current concerns about ageing maternal bodies and the ambivalent
responses of fear and loathing that they provoke. In 2003, Louise Bourgeois made an
installation for the Freud Museum in Vienna entitled The Reticent Child, on the subject
of her own earlier pregnancy and birth of her son, one of several works featuring
maternity and fertility which Bourgeois has created in old age. In Nature Study 2007,
made at the age of 96 years, she depicts carnal couples and pregnant and birthing
figures embodied in brilliant pinks and scarlet reds. Bourgeois represents women as
the powerful agents of the maternal function, marking a return to motherhood as a
central topic of her earlier work. Edward Said posited sources of cultural meaning as
the whole notion of beginning, the moment of birth and origin y reproductive
generation, maturity, and the last great problematic y the last and late period of
life, the decay of the body (Said, 2006: 46). What does it mean for Bourgeois to
return to the theme of birth in her nineties and how does it resonate with
contemporary anxieties about the ageing maternal body? If the space of the gallery is
a safe arena for a woman artist to present sexuality and maternity in old age, how are
older women who break codes of fertility represented elsewhere? In a culture which is
hostile to the conjunction of ageing women with motherhood, I shall argue that
Bourgeois late maternal works can help to undo the taboo on older mothers.
keywords
ageing; bodies; maternal; representation; art
feminist review 93 2009

c 2009 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/09 www.feminist-review.com
(2745)
27
introduction
I walk into the gallery and I am surrounded by images of maternal bodies: multiple
pregnant, birthing bodies and lactating breasts, painted in brilliant crimsons, pinks and
vermilions, and startling in their maternal presence.
(18 June 2008)
Nature Study 2007 is a series of gouaches by the French-American artist Louise

Bourgeois. Created when she was a 96-year-old, they represent women as
powerfully embodied maternal agents, marking a return to motherhood as a
central topic of her work. Self Portrait depicts twenty small pregnant figures,
each like a childs schematic drawing of a woman with swelling belly, a mark for
the pubic cleft, two stick legs, a knob for the head and five bulbous breasts/arms
that radiate like flower petals on top of a swollen seedpod (Figure 1).1 The
figures pulse with energy: some are defined by powerful strokes that are
nevertheless blurred and smudged as though their pregnant bodies tremble with
life, while others are almost obliterated by the crimson wash that has soaked and
stained them. In one of three paintings entitled Pregnant Woman, an active
infant appears to be diving through the solid painted pink flesh of the belly. What
strikes me about these maternal images made towards the end of Bourgeois long
working life, is how much they open out towards the future: pregnancy, birth
and the nurturance of life imply a sense of prospective time as well as reference
to the past.
In this article, I argue that Bourgeois late works incorporate maternal relations
through a series of repetitions and insistent returns to her past as a means
of shaping maternal bodies in the present. I shall explore her complicated
relationship to the maternal by focusing on two artworks The Reticent Child 2003
and Nature Study 2007, each of which addresses the theme of birth directly.
The question that motivates my enquiry is: why does Bourgeois return to themes
of birth and fertility so powerfully in her nineties? If one deeply held cultural
myth is that creativity in later life is about a special maturity, a new spirit of
reconciliation and serenity that comes with age, Bourgeois confounds such
expectations (Said, 2006: 6). Can Bourgeois late maternal works enable us to
think about birth and ageing in different ways? How do we approach the maternal
as it is thought and embodied by an older self? And, in view of the cultural
hostility to older women who give birth, can representations of the maternal body
by Bourgeois help us to understand what is at stake? These questions are the
focus for my argument, which moves between autobiography and late style, the
new visibility of the ageing maternal body, and themes of creativity and
reparation in Bourgeois late works.
28
Louise Bourgeois, ageing, and maternal bodies
1 Nature Study
Inverleith House,
Royal Botanical
Gardens, Edinburgh,
3 May 6 July 2008.
Figure 1 Self Portrait, 2007

Source: Cheim and Read, Hauser and Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve.
autobiographies of the future: Nature Study and

late style
2 Louise Bourgeois
Archive T97, quoted
in Morris (2007:
180).
3 Artforum 20: 4,
December 1982.
I transfer to a scene today emotions that I experienced 40 years ago. Often it is in a

relation I relive today but was this ecstasy present 40 years ago, I doubt it. It is my
desire to recreate that contains. I want, want to find, find, to find I am about to find the
past, I feel it, I have it, I grasp it. I own it forever and ever.
(Louise Bourgeois, c.19591966)2
Critical accounts of Bourgeois art have tended to focus on her psychobiography,

particularly on her difficult childhood relationship to her overbearing father and
his betrayal of her in an affair with her governess, an interpretation encouraged
by Bourgeois own poetic account of her traumatised response to these events in
her work Child Abuse, 1982.3 Feminist critics have doubted the prevalence of this
version of the Freudian family romance, noting that it excludes attention to her
Rosemary Betterton
29
relationship to her mother, a theme that grew in psychic intensity through

Bourgeois mature work.4 In her recent study of Bourgeois, Mignon Nixon argues
that the maternal is a central theme of her sculpture, which turns time and time
again to the beginning, to the dynamics of the maternal-infantile relation
(Nixon, 2005: 9). Indeed, Bourgeois art is constantly informed by turns to her
past in forms of repetition and contradiction that refute the concept of a
whole and unified self bound by a chronological narrative.5 Repetition
characterises her writing too: she dispenses herself in words through multiplying
stories about her life and work, in many interviews over recent decades and in
notebooks, diaries and short text works. These numerous accounts layer each
other so that they become a palimpsest in which early memories are revisited and
constantly reshaped in the telling. Bourgeois seems driven to reconstruct the
images that haunt her, but deliberately reworks them in consciously chosen
incarnations of different form, medium and materials in a practice that is both a
calculated and yet unpredictable staging of psychic processes (Pollock, 1999:
88). Pollock suggests the danger is that we read the work of the artist who makes
material signs to articulate meaning, trauma and memory as the truth of her
life, a reading that Bourgeois herself has to some extent deliberately encouraged.
While psychic processes connect her present ageing and earlier maternal self
these are only made visible through material transformations, which are strikingly
embodied in Nature Study.
In On Late Style; Music and Literature against the Grain, Edward Said discusses
late style as a particular kind of thought or idiom belonging to the last phase of
life. Said suggests that there are the three great human episodes that engage an
artist: The first is the whole notion of beginning, the moment of birth and origin;
the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the
exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive
generation, maturity. And the third is, the last or late period of life, the decay
of the body, the onset of ill health (Said, 2006: 46). He rejects the consoling
view that old age brings wisdom and maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation,
preferring artists who have a special sense of lateness and quarrel with time
(Said, 2006: xixii). He asks: what of artistic lateness not as harmony and
resolution, but intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction? What if
age and ill health dont produce the serenity of ripeness is all? (Said, 2006: 7).
Saids chosen artists are all male and they are distinguished by their
anachronism, being out of step with their time and at odds with the world.
Bourgeois too remains defiant, refusing to compromise with age as she continues
to produce work that is intransigent and unresolved: a way of waging a war
against time by recreating the past (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 19). But, if
Bourgeois embraces the juxtapositions between birth and death, beginnings
and endings, she draws on maternal experience and embodiment in Nature Study
that reveals an altogether different affective economy.
30
4 See Robinson
(1996, 2006), Huhn
(1996), Bernadac
(1998), Pollock
(1999), Bernadac
and Obrist (2000),
Nixon (2005) and
Morris (2007).
5 See Morris (2007).
Figure 2 The Family, 2007

In The Family 2007, twelve panels that complement Self Portrait, the overall
effect of the repeated figures is cartoon-like, suggested by the crude graphic
style and the visual format of small panels arranged horizontally and vertically
within a larger frame (Figure 2). In each panel, a female figure with blossoming
breasts/arms has a small stick infant somersaulting inside her pregnant belly.
Her male partner stands close, barely touching the womans belly with his erect
penis, not so much a form of penetration as a bumping up against her rounded
form. Her belly swells and his penis pokes in mutual embrace, while the spinning
and dancing stick-child whirls inside her. The Family returns to the subject of
Bourgeois major early work, the sculptural group Quarantania I 19471953, in
which she represented herself, her husband Robert Goldwater and their three sons
in the form of five totemic poles. As she later explained: I had children around
my waist. This is the origin of Quarantania. I was carrying my packages (quoted
in Morris, 2007: 234). This was one of a series of sculptures called Personages, in
which life-size human-objects appear in abstracted and reduced form, often
isolated or in small groups: the common characteristic of all these pieces is that
they terminate in a point that expresses the fragility of verticality, and that
Rosemary Betterton
31
represents a superhuman effort to hold oneself up (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000).

Nixon argues persuasively that the Personages assert a correspondence between
materials and the psychic reality of the maternal depressive position that
characterised Bourgeois sculpture in the post-war period: the work of mourning
and the work of mothering converged and their conjunction produced a new
psychic economy in sculpture (Nixon, 2005: 231232). The constant shifting
between psychic spaces and physical objects is evident in the connection
Bourgeois herself made between the material aspects of these sculptures
and the emotional geometry of her state at the time (Bernadac and Obrist,
2000: 352). They were, in her words: Scared stiff. Immobilised with fear. Stuck.
This was an entire period. And then suddenly theres a kind of softening
that came from the softness of my children and my husband; that changed
me a little (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 180). The drooping wooden packages
in Quarantania I suggest the burden of childcare: the central figure is
encumbered by three low slung sacks, appendages suggestive of pregnancy and
maternal devoir (Nixon, 2005: 163). Nixon notes further that their shape
inverts the formal and psychic economy of the standing figures by turning them
upside down.
In a striking return, whether conscious or unconscious, Bourgeois employs exactly
the same forms in Self Portrait and The Family. No longer drooping or
burdensome, these elongated shapes have become five expansive balloon-like
breasts/arms rising from each pregnant figure in what is a generative, even
utopian, image. First in Quarantania I and then in later works Bourgeois re-wrote
her own oedipal script again and again in material form with a maternal figure
her mother and herself at its centre. In The Family, Bourgeois returns to
heterosexual relations in a way that visually transforms them through the fluid
and open-ended drawing in paint. The translation between pictorial materiality
and affect or, more precisely, the embedding of affect in the material properties
of the painted image is what generates new meaning. In one of the scenes each
figure has two heads that meet and fuse into each other; a carnal coupling
without power imbalance in which the masculine partner has become literally and
figuratively (h)arm-less. She thus not only envisions a new maternal self in
this late work, but also replaces the threatening patriarchal father of her
childhood with a benign male figure who shares maternal space on equal terms as
the phallus re-signified becomes merely a penis that nuzzles the womans
pregnant belly.
In contrast to these affirming images of pregnancy, the moment of birth is shown
in intense close up, the crimson paint saturated with both desire and anxiety. In
The Birth, a baby emerges head down and open-mouthed, squeezed between two
huge thighs that in some versions are as sumptuous as strawberry puree and in
others appear to crush the infant with the power of an Aztec birth goddess.
A similar ambivalence between pleasure and pain is evident in The Feeding;
32
a suite of ten magenta red images where the figure of a baby is shown below an
outline of a suspended breast whose poised nipple is withheld from infants
screaming mouth drawn like an O of raw pain and need. The little homunculus,
un-gendered and of indeterminate age, evokes sound and fury in the gaping hole
of its mouth and eyes. Two other versions of The Feeding show a breast suspended
over the prone figure of an infant, and both breast and baby are suffused with a
wash of dark pink that engulfs them in one tide of colour. In one, the baby is
suckling and the separate contours of the mothers body have disappeared, the
childs eyes and mouth barely distinguishable from the nipples which leak milkpaint whereas in the other, it turns away its face and cries with a distorted open
mouth as in Munchs Scream. In another image, five pointed purplish breasts
project comically yet aggressively like inquisitive and threatening objects into
the space surrounding the tiny tadpole-like infant. The Good Mother and The
Bad Mother suggest a frightening interdependency in which the mother holds the
power to threaten the childs very being, while leechlike, it swells to mirror
her breast as it sucks life from her. What astounds me about these images made
in late life by an ageing artist is their visceral intensity, split between birthing
and being birthed, the raw desire for love and comfort as well as the threat
of its loss. We seem to inhabit the psychic world as Melanie Klein described it,
in which the intense relationship of the infant to the breast and body of the
mother continues to stir both love and hatred and powerful curiosity (Klein,
1988: ixx). For Bourgeois, as for Klein, inner psychic reality takes the material
form of objects, but before exploring this idea further, I want to take a sideways
step to look at how perceptions of the ageing female body are shaped in visual
culture and what implications this has for thinking about maternal creativity
in older age.
ageing and the sexual-maternal body

The aging body as imagined and experienced and the aging body as represented structure
each other in endless and reciprocal reverberation.
(Woodward, 1991: 5)
In her study of ageing and gender in twentieth century literature and

psychoanalysis, Ageing and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Kathleen
Woodward argues that the prevailing paradigm of ageing in western culture is
profoundly negative. She notes the obsession with appearance as the dominant
signifier of old age and, more specifically, the absence in psychoanalytic and
literary discourse of representations of old age in terms of creativity in later life.
Woodward suggests that the obsession with age in western consumer culture
produces a binary psychic economy which values youth, seen in terms of fluidity
and movement, at the expense of old age. Against this, she proposes the psychic
imagination of prospective time, a different psychic economy in which we bring
our identifications from the past with us into y imagined futures (Woodward,
Rosemary Betterton
33
1991: 1213). This conscious act of imaginary identification with a stillbecoming-self, rather than nostalgia for what we have once been resonates very
precisely with Bourgeois late maternal works, which also bear inflections
towards the future, as autobiography in the prospective, not retrospective
mood (Woodward, 1999: 160). Woodward contrasts this psychic body with the
specular body, in which performing age is principally a bodily effect anchored
in visuality (Woodward, 2006: 167). She suggests that the youthful structure
of the look, one that is further inflected by gender, is the default position of the
spectator within a contemporary ideology of youth culture. But, if the body in old
age is socially constructed in terms of visibility, it is at the same time
stigmatised, both signified as the body in decline and subjectively absent,
a condition which renders the older female body paradoxically both hypervisible
and invisible (Woodward, 2006: 163).
Simone de Beauvoir was the first to recognise the ambivalent experience of
the ageing process for women, suggesting that we can not fully accept our own
ageing, but can only picture what we are through the vision that others have of
us (Beauvoir, 1972: 291).
In Old Age, she noted the deep cultural ambivalence towards the elderly whereby
they are either viewed as serene and wise or as abject and sexually repulsive
(Beauvoir, 1972: 13). Beauvoir saw acutely that we are frightened by old age, of
losing or changing identity and becoming as another to myself (Beauvoir, 1972:
5, original emphasis). This experience of an alienation displaced onto the others
gaze is echoed in Woodwards specular, but Beauvoirs objective view of old age
is more deeply pessimistic coupled with her subjective disgust at her own ageing
body, which she explored in her fiction (Beauvoir, 1972: 378).6 She had little to
say about older womens sexual lives, except where she relates the mediaeval
Spanish story of Celestina (1492), as the first literary example of an old woman
as protagonist, albeit a self-seeking, lewd, and intriguing old woman, and
something of a witch as well (Beauvoir, 1972: 148).
This might well describe Robert Mapplethorpes Portrait of Louise Bourgeois 1982,
where she appears at the age of 71 years with a crinkled face and hands, dressed
in a monkey fur coat and cradling under her arm her earlier sculpture Fillette
1968, in the form of a giant latex phallus (Figure 3). Bourgeois chose to be
represented by Mapplethorpe with an uncompromising directness, wrinkles
and all, and like Beauvoir she despises growing old serenely. She uses humour and
irony as forms of resistance to stereotypes of ageing, sending up her older self by
sporting her potent sculpture as well as a wicked grin. The image challenges
binary codes that rigidly demarcate old age and sexuality, impotence and
potency, sex and gender. By donning her elderly monkey fur coat for the portrait,
Bourgeois also collapses boundaries between flesh and fur, human and animal, in
a manner that is deeply eroticised. In this respect, Mapplethorpes photograph is
more than a portrait of the artist as an old woman; it is a record of a particular
34
6 See Beauvoir
(1969).
Figure 3 Robert Mapplethorpe Louise Bourgeois in 1982 with Fillette (1968). Photo copyright
1982 the Estate of Robert Mapplethrope.
7 Bourgeois gives
the circumstances of
the photograph,
describing how her
own fear led her to
performance of age and gender enacted by Bourgeois herself. Her burlesque

upsetting of categories confronts our cultural horror of older womens sexuality
and, moreover, through the typology of the Madonna, she connects this
specifically with the power of the mother. In her reading of the photograph, Nixon
suggests that Fillette is an object being mothered in a parody of this maternal
ideal. Bourgeois strips away sentimentality, laying bare a repressed maternal
aggression y Bourgeoiss performance shows a powerfully desiring kind of
mother, while at the same time underlining the pathology of mothering conceived
as the projection of all desire onto the infant body (Nixon, 2005: 78). In
Bourgeois own account of the photograph, she explains that Fillette represents
a masculine object that she holds tenderly as a comfort; she is literally in
possession of the phallus: The word fillette is an extremely delicate thing that
needs to be protected (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 183). This gender ambiguity
is compounded when Bourgeois suggests that you can also carry it around like a
baby, have it as a doll (quoted in Lippard 1976: 243). The multivalence of
Bourgeois sculptural referents in the context of the photograph makes Fillette
simultaneously her husbands penis, a doll, a baby, a little girl and a little
Louise (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 202).7 Here, old age is no barrier to sexual
and maternal desire and, indeed, reveals what the cultural conventions of
motherhood can not, feelings of desire and aggression of the mother towards her
infant.
Rosemary Betterton
35
Portrait of Louise Bourgeois 1982 can be contrasted with Woodwards account

of post-menopausal pregnancy represented in the cartoon of a pregnant
grandmother featured on the cover of The New Yorker in 1997:
Here, the figure of the pregnant woman beyond menopause is represented in terms of comic
derision, one that both responds to and promotes moral panic. As the cartoon suggests, the
very association of fertility with an older body is absurd, a cultural contradiction in terms,
one that in the register of humour elicits a dismissive smile of superiority. Thus, here the
conflation of the reproductive body and the post-reproductive body is presented as
ridiculous, unnatural, perhaps even perverse.
(Woodward, 2006: 168)
bring Fillette as a
precaution against
catastrophe y a
little Louise y . It
gave me security
(Bernadac and
Obrist, 2000: 202).
In the cartoon the pregnant old woman is the butt of ridicule, but in
Mapplethorpes photograph Bourgeois turns the joke onto the viewer: wrinkled
and grinning she holds on to her potency and desire as contradictory signifiers.
What emerges from Woodwards critique of gender and ageing, read in
conjunction with Bourgeois portrait, is the rejection of simplistic and negative
stereotypes associated with older womens sexuality and a more complex account
of their capacity for maternal and sexual desire. Woodward also reads the
caricature as a condensation of attitudes to new reproductive technologies that
enable older women to give birth. If womens post-menopausal sexuality and
fertility is still conventionally represented as either the subject of derision, or
else entirely absent, what happens when older women do become pregnant and
give birth? If the space of a gallery has become one arena where women can
transgress sexual and maternal norms in relative safety, how are older women
who break the codes of age and fertility currently being represented?
Recent debates about older women who give birth as a result of new reproductive
technologies are witness to current confusions in what Imogen Tyler terms the
new visibility of the maternal (Tyler, 2008). In July 2006 Britains oldest mother,
Dr Patricia Rashbrook, a 63 year old child psychiatrist gave birth to a baby boy
by Caesarean section after receiving fertility treatment from the maverick
scientist Severino Antinori (Boseley, 2006). She was outed by The Sun newspaper
in her seventh month of pregnancy, which prompted widespread discussion of her
age (although not that of her 61-year-old husband), and the fact that the
couple had travelled to the former Soviet Union for IVF treatment, to which she
was not legally entitled in Britain. Such news reports of births to older mothers
are invariably accompanied by debates about the appropriate upper age limit for
IVF treatment, the perils of pregnancy in later life, unregulated reproductive
tourism, and the health and welfare of children born to older mothers.8 These
debates pose medical and ethical questions, but clearly reveal the assumptions
about what constitutes normal pregnancy and birth. The couples choice of
doctor was also controversial: Italian fertility specialist Severino Antinori had
already helped several women to become pregnant after menopause using donor
eggs, and declared that he was prepared to clone a human embryo. His
36
8 For examples, see

http://www
.guardian.co.uk/
lifeandstyle/2008/
jul/30/health
.genderissues;
http://www
.guardian.co.uk/
2006/may/04/
familyand
relationships
.health/print.
justification for Rashbrooks IVF treatment was revealing: The couple love each
other, she is slim, blonde and in perfect condition, she fits all the criteria for
maternity. She should live for at least another 2025 years we are not giving
birth to an orphan (Boseley, 2006).
His breathtaking description of her fitness for maternity reinforces the prevailing
stereotype of a pregnant woman as young (or at least in this case looking so),
white and in a heterosexual relationship. As well as her age and fitness for birth,
Dr Rashbrooks professional status as a consultant psychiatrist in the adolescent
mental health service in East Sussex was a feature of the reports. The inference
was that as a career woman she had deferred childbearing until too late
(although she already had two children in their twenties), and that as a child
psychologist she should have known better about the negative effects of ageing
parents on a child. The couple themselves stated rather defensively that they did
not think it was appropriate to discuss their circumstances: We wish to
emphasise however that this has not been an endeavour undertaken lightly or
without courage, that a great deal of thought has been given to y providing
for the childs present and future wellbeing, medically, socially and materially.
Or, as Antinori put it more baldly (and with outrageous parental presumption):
She should live for at least another 20 to 25 years we are not giving birth to an
orphan (Boseley, 2006). In the context of this media onslaught, Rashbrooks
courage was undoubted and her treatment by the press reveals the extent to
which public perception of older women giving birth is still shaped in negative
ways. Although Rashbrooks story could have been written as an individuals
triumph-over-tragedy, her subjective maternal experience was largely absent
from the controversy surrounding the birth of her child. Her treatment by the
news media indicates the moral panic evoked by older maternal bodies: a woman
who desires to prolong her reproductive (and by implication, sexual) life beyond
menopause is still stereotyped as abnormal. If psychic violence is the response to
womens ageing sexual and maternal bodies, we need representations of old age
that offer us imaginative projections that we can potentially inhabit.
creating maternal bodies: performance

to prosthetics
Bourgeois performs age differently, modelling the polarities that inform our cultural
expectations of women in terms of youth and age and transmuting them in the process,
presenting a creative female body that is not post-reproductive but productive, a new kind
of female body in older age, one that is in fact appearing on the world stage. (Woodward,
2006: 170)
In Performing Age, Performing Gender, Woodward identifies questions that

she proposes are absent from both feminism and the arts: How is the older
Rosemary Betterton
37
female body represented and y performed in visual mass culture? How have
older women artists performed age? (Woodward, 2006: 162, original emphasis).9
Looking to creative and performing women as cultural models, she is interested
in how older women are represented and represent themselves. She cites the
performance of gender by three artists including Bourgeois, who seek to expose,
critique, subvert, and exceed the conventions of aging for older women by
publicly, playfully, theatrically, flamboyantly, sardonically, ironically, and
pensively, self-consciously performing age (Woodward, 2006: 167). Woodward
discusses a 1975 photograph of Bourgeois wearing a moulded latex sculpture
that encases the artists body from her chin to below her knees. She reads this
image as suggesting breasts and genitals; body parts that endow the artist with
the shape of pregnancy y it recalls an outsized ovary, one that has released
many eggs (Woodward, 2006: 170). I agree, and would argue further that
Bourgeois also deliberately subverts gender and sexual codes in her performance
of a prosthetic pregnancy.
At the opening of a performance entitled A Banquet/ A Fashion Show of Body
Parts in New York in 1978, similar costumes made of latex moulds were worn in a
comedic show of cross-dressing by well-known male figures from the art world,
although not by Bourgeois herself. In this context, the body suits were sexually
ambiguous: a male parody of the maternalfeminine body or the feminine
engulfing the male body either reading is possible. In another photograph
taken on the steps of her brownstone house in New York, both Bourgeois and
the costume appear even more decrepit, her head inclined downwards and the
sculpture battered and dented. The same iconography of bulging and sagging
latex forms appeared in her first major installation in 1974, then called Le Repas
du Soir (The Evening Meal) and later re-titled The Destruction of the Father.
Bourgeois has described this work as a fantasy of the childrens revenge on the
father in which they dismembered him and ate him up at the dinner table
(Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 102). The murderous rage of the betrayed daughter
is played out in a monstrous parody of consumption that anticipates her more
sexually ambivalent Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts. In later
reconstructions, the womb-like interior of The Destruction of the Father is
theatrically staged with dramatic red spotlighting, which points to performance
as a means of acting out the psychic self. By destroying her father and reframing her relationship with her mother, she replaces the Oedipal triangle with a
different one, mothermotherchild, in which female generational relationships
and the active role of the mother is central. As Nixon argues, this aggressive oral
fantasy should be understood as an assault on patriarchy y from within the
body of the mother (Nixon, 2005: 260). In a series of installations entitled Cells,
made in her seventies and early eighties, Bourgeois extends the processes of
mapping and embodying the matriarch-spider that delineate a self-determined,
architectural and material description of the artists own psychic space
38
9 See Foundation
for Womens Art
(2002) and Arbeloff
(2008).
10 See Bernadac
(1998), Pollock
(1999) and Robinson
(2006).
11 See Klein (1988).
(Robinson, 2006: 138). The Cells articulate Bourgeois relation to her past but
with a sense of bracketing childhood experience literally barred by cages, doors
and windows; they invoke a sense of claustrophobic intimacy and insecurity. The
objects encased within are literal, for example, her worn garments and also
function metaphorically to stage subjectivity and self-knowledge through what
Pollock calls the relief of signification (Pollock, 1999: 82).10
I propose the idea of the prosthetic as a useful means of marking the distance
between Bourgeois maternal experience (which we cannot know) and the
material fabrications that she creates, while still holding on to the embodied
qualities of her work. What is at issue is not the symbolisation of emotion in the
form of identifiable figures or signs, but mistaking these bodies for Bourgeois
own. The prosthetic describes more precisely how maternal desire and loss are
lodged as contrary affects in Bourgeois work through the embedding of psychic
textures in the material form of objects. One early example is Pregnant Woman
19471949, where the figure of her sister Henriette is represented as an
enormous pregnant woman with a wooden leg, as both a metaphor for her sisters
unachieved desire to have a child and literally as a prosthesis for her crippled
knee, signified by the cane she used to support it (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000:
126127). The wooden-leg-pregnant-woman is prosthetic in the sense of being
a material object that stands in for her sisters body and a synecdoche for
Henriettes psychic and physical pain. Bourgeois repeated returns to prosthetic
figures like Femme Couteau 19691970, and Arch of Hysteria 19921993, can be
seen as deliberate attempts to repair disabling and traumatic experiences
through the alterity of representation. In the final section of this article, I want
to explore this prosthetic practice further as it operates in Bourgeois installation
The Reticent Child.
love, guilt and reparation11: The Reticent

Child
My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it.
This sense of reparation is very deep within me.
I break everything I touch because I am violent. I destroy my friendships, my love, my
children. People would not generally suspect it, but the cruelty is there in the worky
I break things because I am afraid. (Morris 2007: 242)
Bourgeois returned to the theme of pregnancy and birth in The Reticent Child,
an installation made for the Freud Museum in Vienna in 2003. It comprises six
small figurative sculptures on small plinths against a long concave mirror set on
a steel table, so that each figure is reflected and appears doubled front
and back. From left to right they are: a standing pregnant woman; a red sac
Rosemary Betterton
39
womb placed on a marble slab, a winged standing figure with a net belly
enclosing a foetus; a prone woman in the act of giving birth; a small child
lying on its side on a bed, and a standing male figure with his head in his hands.
Read sequentially, these are six stages surrounding the birth of her third
son Alain in 1941, who she described in the text accompanying the installation
as a child who simply refused to be born y He is the reticent child. Il etait
reticent. Mais jai lai revele [He was reticent. But I found him out] (Morris,
2007: 38). In a suite of engravings and texts made in 1947, He Disappeared Into
Complete Silence, Bourgeois had described her descent into depression in the
years after his birth:
Once there was a mother of a son. She loved him with a complete devotion. And she
protected him because she knew how sad and wicked this world is. He was of a quiet nature
and rather intelligent but he was not interested in being loved or protected because he was
interested in something else. Consequently at an early age he slammed the door and never
came back. Later on she died but he did not know it. (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 48)
In The Reticent Child, the figures are made from pink fabric, all except for the
marble child on its cushioned metal bed. In their fragility and isolation, the tiny
fabric figures evade neat encapsulation: they appear to oscillate somewhere
between fear of abandonment and self-reflection, between vulnerability and
reparation. Bourgeois had begun to make sculptures from cloth in the 1990s
and they range in size from tiny dolls to life-size figures, often crudely stitched
and stuffed in cotton or terrycloth. These fabric works are sewn by hand and
recall the repair of Aubusson tapestries in the family business where Bourgeois
grew up, learning the skills of needlework from her mother and grandmother. The
act of sewing therefore suggests the reparative power of the needle in relation
to Bourgeois mother, who died when she was a 20-year-old and whom she
identified with the figure of the spider as spinner and weaver: my best friend was
my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty,
subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as an araignee (Bernadac and Obrist,
2000: 321). Like worn clothes, fabric carries personal affects and repairing is
the way of keeping things together when they start to fall apart. But stitching
can also be an act of cruelty, both literally and metaphorically I stitched him
up and, as Linda Nochlin acutely remarks of Bourgeois late fabric sculpture,
its power lies in the deliberate ferocity of its bad sewing, noting that old-age
style presents outrages wrought on the vulnerable, cloth embodied female
subject itself (Nochlin, 2007: 191192).
Writers on Bourgeois have frequently turned to psychoanalytic theory in their
readings of her work and Bourgeois own relation to psychoanalysis is a close and
complex one.12 After an early engagement with Freudian theory via Surrealism,
Bourgeois expressed her disappointment in Freud and Lacan: They promised the
truth and just came up with theory. They were like my father: promise so much
40
12 See Huhn (1996),

Robinson (1996,
2006), Pollock
(1999), Nicoletta
(2005), Nixon
(2005), and Larratt
Smith (2008).
and deliver so little (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 229). Nixon argues that Klein
provided Bourgeois with an alternative psychoanalytic model in which the figure
of the mother, not the father, is central to the psychic life of a child. By laying
claim to maternal subjectivity, Bourgeois work, exposes the cultural taboos on
the representation of the maternal subject (especially the maternal subject of
desire and death) that persist in art and psychoanalysis alike (Nixon, 2005: 12).
While there is nothing to indicate when Bourgeois read Kleins writings, by the
1960s she was evidently interested enough to consider training in the psychology
of art and childhood, and the titling of subsequent works like The Bad Mother
1997 and The Good Breast 2007, suggest she became well aware of Kleinian
readings of her own work. What Bourgeois takes directly from Klein is her interest
in making reparation, both as a psychic process through which the child (and
adult) can make good feelings of aggression, guilt and anxiety experienced in
infancy and, more specifically, in relation to art as a means of restoring and
recreating lost psychic objects (Klein, 1988: 313). In an essay written in 1929,
Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative
Impulse, Klein gives an account of a woman painter who was subject to deep
depression and whose painting she analyses as a form of restoration for loss: It
is obvious that the desire to make reparation, to make good the injury
psychologically done to the mother and also to restore herself was at the bottom
of the compelling urge to paint (Klein, 1929: 93). While Bourgeois work resists
such obvious interpretations, I see the installation of The Reticent Child in the
Freud Museum in Vienna as a direct riposte to Freudian psychoanalysis on behalf
of Klein. But in Kleinian analysis, the mother figure remains a projection of the
childs phantasy and a psychic object rather than being a subject in her own
right. While Bourgeois adopts a Kleinian approach in The Reticent Child, her
central interest in the mother-as-subject in relation to the child also extends its
theoretical parameters.
This can be seen more clearly in a related work, The Woven Child 2002 (Figure 4),
in which a figure of a tiny baby made of pink terrycloth is suspended in a pink
gauze net from a large sieve set vertically on a metal base. The sieve functions as
a prosthetic mother figure, her face tilted downwards supporting the baby,
which in turn reaches its arms and legs up towards her. The fabric infant is
suspended like a little fish in the net; he is fragile and precarious, but protected
by the enfolding mother-sieve. Both infant and mother are caught within a
mutual gaze; their relationship is a reciprocal one in which the mother is also
enmeshed; her look holds the infant. The Woven Child thus enacts the primary
maternal subjectobject relation before the point of separation. This is closer to
the psychic model that Jessica Benjamin develops centred on the concept of an
intersubjective space, in which it is possible to identify with the others position
without losing ones own (quoted in Baraitser, 2009: 30). Benjamin argues
that the infants capacity for intersubjective space is made possible through the
Rosemary Betterton
41
Figure 4 The Woven Child, 2002

mother figure in a mutual recognition of otherness that ensures its separation

of self. In Benjamins model, as Lisa Baraitser explains, there is a constant
tension and play between subject positions and object relations: When
intersubjective space breaks down, (when destruction is truly destructive, if
you like, when the other does not survive, but instead retaliates or abandons)
there is a return to the complementary positioning of internal objects (Baraitser,
2009: 30).
In Destruction of the Father, Bourgeois had enacted the oral phantasy of the
daughter who retaliates by eating up her father. The Reticent Child acts as
Bourgeois riposte to her own installation made 30 years previously, in which the
42
terrifying red interior is replaced by a mirror, and destruction by reparation: In

intersubjective space both reflection and also analysis become possible on the
mother/analysts side because the infant/patient experiences the other as truly
external through the survival of its own destructive impulses (Baraitser, 2009:
30). In Bourgeois personal iconography: Mirror means the acceptance of the
self (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 260), a state in which reflection and analysis
become possible after surviving her own destructive impulses. Bourgeois makes a
distinction between two different approaches to her sculpture: the spontaneous
kind as an expression of immediate, all-consuming importance to me, and a
work of assemblage; a synthesis, a putting together of elements, which is
peaceful as opposed to the outburst of the previous type of work (Bernadac and
Obrist, 2000: 8485). The Reticent Child belongs to the latter type as an attempt
to reflect and to repair the damage done to her son. The movement from
pregnant to birthing woman, and from the childs isolation to the mans grief
reflects on the difficult process of separation: He abandoned everything because
he had been abandoned. I will never make him understand. I make work with
my concerns. I make work with all my failures. When I say the trauma of
abandonment, I really mean what I say (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 246). But
in the mirrors curved reflection the sequence can also be read in reverse from
right to left: the grieving son, now grown, turns back towards the birthing and
pregnant body of his mother, tracing a potential path of return if he can but
understand. The prosthetic figures of The Reticent Child make reparation after
injury; they both witness to trauma and place it at one remove through a work of
assemblage.
It would be too neat and too implausible to reach the final stages of
Bourgeois maternal work without a further return to its fundamental
ambivalence. The Reticent Child shows the work of maternal reparation, but
also that the pain of loss is never given up nor mourning entirely resolved in
older age. In The Arrival 2007, the maternal figure takes the form of a small cloth
torso of a pregnant woman with huge breasts and without arms or legs, lying
on her back as a babys head emerges from her vagina, appearing like a reverse
image of her own head. It is seamed around the breasts and through the navel,
the natural coloured cloth of the head and torso contrasting with the custard
yellow of the breasts and the bright pink used for nipples, vulva and both figures
open mouths. There is something extremely painful and poignant about the
helplessness of this carefully stitched and stuffed duo: like a reversible doll,
the two headed figure can be viewed both ways up to imply an interdependent
corporeality in which both mother and infant seem equally trapped. In this
antithesis of maternal comfort, we are confronted again with Kleins good and
bad object, the subject of infantile love and hate, bliss and violence. However,
I think Bourgeois late maternal works can also move us forward to the possibility
of a non-retaliatory maternal figure who bears destruction so that the infant
Rosemary Betterton
43
can develop the capacity for intersubjective space (Baraitser, 2009: 39). In
The Arrival, the fabric figure bears the destruction of birth, just as in The
Reticent Child Bourgeois explores the self returning from an encounter with
the other, changed, thereby opening the possibility of a maternal subjectivity
arising out of an encounter with alterity rather than through the processes of
surviving destruction (Baraitser, 2009: 39).
Baraitsers account of maternal subjectivity as an ongoing and relational process
resonates with Bourgeois late style and practice as an older artist: she remains
a maternal subject who is still unaccommodated in old age (Baraitser, 2009:
11). Bourgeois reworking of family relationships has implications for thinking
about the relation between time and memory as generative rather than traumatic
or merely nostalgic; it is an artistic practice of re-making the past that is also
about imagined futures. In these late works, Bourgeois employs a range of
prosthetic bodies to connect past maternal experience with prospective time.
They represent a refiguration of our relation to new and necessary fictions of who
we once were, are and would like to be (Baraitser, 2009: 52). This is the tense of
the future anterior, of what could have been and may still be, as a generative
moment of birth from which something new may re-emerge after loss. Bourgeois
maternal time is a psychic projection forward and backward in multiple
movements that are cyclical and spiral, a tangible way of recreating a missed
past (Bernadac and Obrist, 2000: 106). In this late maternal time, the past is
not fully present and the future is yet to be determined. In this sense, Bourgeois
remains a maternal subject in old age, still bearing witness to the desires and
losses, pleasures and pains of the older maternal body.
author biography
Rosemary Betterton is Emeritus Reader in Womens Studies at Lancaster
University and has published widely on womens historical and contemporary art
practices, feminist cultural theory and practice, gender, embodiment and
representation, including An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body,
Routledge, 1996, and Unframed: Practices and Politics of Womens Contemporary
Painting, (editor) I.B.Tauris Ltd. 2004. She is currently completing a book entitled
Maternal Bodies in Visual Culture for Manchester University Press.
references
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Baraitser, L. (2009) Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, London & New York: Routledge.
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Beauvoir, S. (1972) Old Age, London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Bernadac, M.-L. (1998) Louise Bourgeois, London: Serpentine Gallery.
44
Bernadac, M.-L. and Obrist, H.-U. editors, (2000) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father/
Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews 19231997, Paris: Violette Editions.
Boseley, S. (2006) Psychiatrist to become UKs oldest mother http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/
2006/may/05/health.genderissues
Foundation for Womens Art (2002) Art Age and Gender: Women Explore the Issues, London:
Foundation for Womens Art.
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Zegher, C. (1996) editor, Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of and
from the Feminine, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Edinburgh.
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Essays on Womens Art, New York: E.P. Dutton.
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MIT Press.
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Bourgeois, London: Tate.
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doi:10.1057/fr.2009.25
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93 Louise Bourgeois, ageing,

and maternal bodies

feminist review 93 2009

Nature Study 2007 is a series of gouaches by the French-American artist Louise

feminist review 93 2009