Again, Bourgeois opens herself up

PARIS -- At age 96, artist Louise Bourgeois has lost none of her ability to startle and unsettle: Her latest major series includes giant etchings of her own body -- including esophagus, stomach and intestines -- all soaked with blood-red gouache.

The 11 panels are a gallery-sized lament on the limitations of the body, with Bourgeois describing her own physical sensations in spindly handwriting. One panel almost moans: “The breathing, the palpitations, THE HOT FLASHES.”

The French-born American artist, one of the world’s most admired sculptors, finished the series “Extreme Tension” in December, in time for it to join a retrospective that opened this month at Paris’ Georges Pompidou Center.

On display for the first time, “Extreme Tension” is one of several new works added after the retrospective’s first stop at the Tate Modern in London. If “Extreme Tension” stems from fears about aging, the artist’s look at those fears is brave and unflinching.

“The work is her life. It’s a guarantee of sanity, as she says,” said Jonas Storsve, who curated the exhibit with Marie-Laure Bernadac.

Bourgeois, who rarely travels, was not in Paris for the opening but answered questions sent to her New York studio by e-mail, including one about what advice she would give young artists starting out.

“Tell your own story, and you will be interesting,” she responded. “Don’t get the green disease of envy. Don’t be fooled by success and money. Don’t let anything come between you and your work.”

Bourgeois has fashioned her career out of telling her story. Everything is fodder, figuratively and literally -- she is even ripping up the clothes she saved throughout her lifetime to use in art. Her childhood in Choisy-le-Roi outside Paris, where her parents restored tapestries, is constantly present. Her childhood “never lost its magic, its mystery or its tragedy,” as she once said.

Many works reference an early betrayal -- her father’s affair with the family’s young English governess. The exhibition opens with a symbol of the end of childhood innocence: a pink marble model of her childhood home trapped in a cage, a guillotine blade hanging above it.

The theme of cages, or “cells,” as she calls them, comes up repeatedly. In “Dangerous Passage,” from 1997, Bourgeois lined up memories of her childhood in a corridor-shaped cage strewed with symbolic objects: an antique child’s swing on one side, broken bones on the other.

Bourgeois’ mother turns up often: She is the inspiration for her famous giant spider sculptures that have shown around the world, one of which prowls in Paris’ Tuileries Gardens. Bourgeois has said it’s a compliment to equate the creature with her mother, “who was as deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider.”

It’s characteristic of Bourgeois’ sense of humor to call the huge spider sculptures “Maman,” or “Mama.”

Though much of Bourgeois’ work is disturbing -- knives abound, as do severed limbs, headless figures and artificial limbs -- some of it is sheer beauty, such as “Extreme Tension.” The work, a series of panels in ink and red gouache, is a tribute to her assistant of 30 years, Jerry Gorovoy, who arrives in her workshop every morning. Showing two pairs of red hands -- one grasping in need, one helping -- it’s called “10 a.m. Is When You Come to Me.”

“Louise Bourgeois” runs at the Georges Pompidou Center through June 2.