The Ghost of Trauma Past.(Arts)

Byline: Amber Haq

A retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris reveals how heavily artist Louise Bourgeois mined her own childhood.

Growing up in the suburban Parisian town of Choisy-le-Roi, Louise Bourgeois, the now 96-year-old enfant terrible of contemporary art, lived by the Seine in a grand mansion attached to a workshop that housed her parents' tapestry restoration business. Her sculpture "Cell (Choisy)" (1990-1993) is a miniature copy of that house, sculpted in rose marble, but encased in a cage and with a guillotine hanging over it. The only way to escape our captive past, she seems to be saying, is to sever ourselves from it. The piece encapsulates Bourgeois's lifelong mission: to transform the traumas of childhood into art.a"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it," she wrote in an autobiographical text entitled "Child Abuse" in 1982. "[And then] if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor."

The work is on display in a thought-provoking exhibit that marks the artist's homecoming to Paris: "Retrospective Louise Bourgeois," a collection of her work from 1938 to 2007, at the Centre Pompidou (through June 2, then moving to the Guggenheim in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art). Some 200 works capture the magic and drama of a childhood fairy tale turned bitter, challenging viewers to look outside their comfort zones. "It takes the form of a continuous psychoanalysis, and therein lies its strength," says Jonas Storsve, curator of the exhibit. "Everybody can find elements of his or her history in her work. That's why people react so strongly to it." Using a wide variety of media--including marble, bronze, fabric and latex--Bourgeois has explored themes of familial deceit, sexuality and lost identity, maternity and the continuous cycle of life and death. "She can see the possibilities in a certain material, which we cannot see," says Storsve. "With heraconjuring hands, she can take a speck of dust and infuse it with something precious and amazing."

Born in 1911, Bourgeois is considered one of the most creative and seminal female forces of the 20th century. Her art centers on a woman's victimization, rage and rebellion, and the sewing machines, needles and thread which surrounded her as a child, today form the motifs of her ...