Womens Studies, 41:904924, 2012

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2012.718650

PROTECTIVE BUILDINGS, EXPOSED BODIESTHE

FEMME MAISON -IMAGERY IN THE
ART OF LOUISE BOURGEOIS
KATHARINA ECK
University of Bremen

One night I dreamed I was becoming huge, so huge that the house
exploded into bloody shreds all around me, and suddenly I was walking
in a vast forest.
Marie Darrieussecq, Louises House
Just at this moment her head struck against the roof at the hall: in fact
she was now rather more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the
little golden key and hurried off to the garden door. Poor Alice! It was as
much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the
garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she
sat down and began to cry again.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Louise Bourgeois: A Women Artists Pioneer

When debating the status of the woman painter or artist today,
a long and controversial history of female artistic production as
well as its various social, political, economic, and philosophical
implications in a typically male-dominated domain is invoked. The
outstanding work of Louise Bourgeois (d. May 31, 2010) cannot
be absent in a recall of women artists achievements over the last
decades to this still-in-transformation time of today. The fascinating work of this French artist, who immigrated to New York in
1938, has compelled wide interest and academic investigation,
at the very least because her work can be located within the
sociopolitical frame of the feminist movement(s) of the 1960s.
As indicated in the Centre Pompidou exhibition volume of Beaux
Address correspondence to Katharina Eck, Mariann Steegmann Institute Art and
Gender, University of Bremen, Germany. E-mail: Katharina.Eck@uni-bremen.de

904

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Arts (2008): Suddenly, women artists brought something new

to art history. She has paved the way for them. . . . (Bernadac
and Storsve 8).1 The emotional intensity inherent to her art has
often been emphasized and put in relation to childhood experiences that she has herself largely interpreted in writings and
interviews.2 Her fathers affair with the English tutor Sadie caused
feelings of jealousy and anger in her, and it is this very enragement
about the open destruction of family structures that critics mostly
address when talking about Bourgeoiss art. However, her artmaking process, ideas, and material experimentations certainly do
not merely reflect her personal experiences. My aim is to point
out the relevance of her objects as such and the (formal, semantical, philosophical) relations within her heterogeneous artwork.
To this end, I will concentrate on one of Bourgeoiss most persistent images: the Femmes Maisons series dealing with the semantics
of housing, home, and femininity and especially with feminine
body shapes. I attempt to give a rough overview of her complex
work of art and its interpretations given by curators and art critics.
Thereby, I will be able to lighten the status of the Femme Maison
theme within her work, and then proceed to outline how certain motives and semantical fields linked to this theme regularly
(re)appear in other contexts of her lifelong creative process.
Bourgeoiss work is often associated with various art movements that are said to have influenced herabove all, Surrealism
and, later on, Abstract Expressionism. Of course, no artistmale
or femaleis free from influences, but creativity lies in making up
new images and finding new forms; in the case of Bourgeois, this
process is inexhaustible in its output. As I said above, she never
stops exploring themes, by re-arranging images in various material
forms and thus preventing her art from being completed or welldefined. In the 1960s, she experimented with plaster, cement,
rubber latex, and plastics, as well as marble and bronze, creating
a multitude of shapes and images that defy easy categorization or
systematic stylistic analysis . . . (Wye 23). It can be stated to be her
artistic strategy to rely on shapes and figures that she had already
used earlier on. To give an example, she invented her strange
1
French original: Tout coup, les artistes femmes apportaient quelque chose de neuf
dans lhistoire de lart. Elle leur a ouvert la voie. . . .
2
See Louise BourgeoisDestruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father , Ed. MarieLaure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, London 1998.

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Katharina Eck

Cumulsvery organic and eruptive elements which remind one of

breasts or bubblesin some sketch-like drawings, and used these
forms again by the end of the 1960s, when she arranged them in
large three-dimensional landscapes of Cumuls.
Another impressive example of this artistic strategy is the
imagery she uses in her works of Lair : Little holes make these
objects look like a hiding place (similar to a lair found in the
countryside), but simultaneously they convey the perception of
shaping exits. The resulting dichotomy of hiding versus escaping makes this holey artwork literally opaque. It is possible to see
in these Lairs a kind of predecessor of the buildings and their
indicated window-openings used in the Femmes Maisons works.
The Lair develops into a house, and the artistic complex of shelter, of protection from the exterior, and of retreat is transferred
from a context of wildlife to a domestic and seemingly civilized
sphere. Bourgeoiss objects of art are highly marked by an interdependence: once a certain idea and a corresponding imagery is
developed, it is readopted in ever-changing contexts. Thus, there
is no progression in quality from earlier to later works, as they
all take part in a creative cosmos, while at the same time every single artwork is capable of conveying meaning in its own way. It is
important not to see these works either as isolated pieces or as
parts of an entity that is still to be identified. Instead, they express
relationships among each other: The Lairs become houses or even
skyscrapers, and the at first glance undefined Cumuls landscapes
become subtle body landscapes. Louise Bourgeois is very playful
with her objects and with the irritation they arouse, and it is well
worth to have this attitude of hers in mind, as it undermines the
various obsessive debates on psychoanalytical aspects of her work.
In the following, I will elaborate these thoughts.
Bourgeoiss Art: The Presence of FeelingsDesire and Control
As I have already implied, any logical or categorizing attempts
to understand Bourgeoiss art would sooner or later result in
a shortened view of it. Nonetheless, it will be worthwhile to
regard her objects as fetish-like presences, bestowed with the
capacity to unite contradictory feelings. Most notably, feelings
of desire or devotion are opposed to (sexual) self-control.
Not only the content of her artifacts, but also the form and
specific construction give the impression that oppositions are

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FIGURE 1 Louise Bourgeois: Uncontrollable Torrent, 1997.

momentarily conjoined. The painting Uncontrollable Torrent

(1997) (see Figure 1) is marked by wild curved lines that refer
to feminine curves appearing in a majority of her objects and
pictures. Moreover, these lines shape a bed containing female
lips, thus hinting at sexual (feminine) powers. The second word
of the title alludes to the fact that these powers are as strong as
natural forcestorrents. As the artist defines all parameters and
geometrically puts the torrents (or vibrances, or hatching, orin
the sculptural objectscombinations of uncommon material and
forms) in order, the impossibility of control claimed in the title
is annulled by the artworks composition itself. The torrents are
not a completely new invention, but re-appear from the Femmes
Maisons paintings and objects from the 1940s, and stand for the
desirecontrol and the rebellionassimilation dichotomyartistic
concerns that Bourgeois expresses in continuously new ways and
forms with a subtle but distinguishable humor.
Speaking of content and form or formal outlines, and of the
presence of objects and feelings connected with them, Gabriele
Werner underlines that the geometrical dimension is indeed a
tool in a set of artistic strategies: In this sense geometry is in fact
a tool and not an end in itself. In their totality, geometry becomes
a metaphor for the work of cognition . . . (94). Interestingly, in
the same anthology dealing with Intimate Abstractions in the work

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Katharina Eck

of Louise Bourgeois, scholars discuss her geometrical approach

side by side with her anti-form tendencies. In her creative process,
she begins with wood and metallic sculpture, examining more,
and other, softer materials. She presents all new forms and artifacts in a humorous way, as with the title End of Softness given to
a 1967 bronze sculpture: Her title choices convey a lot about the
ideas behind her art and often put some effects into perspective
or even veto an assumed effect. Categories like hard and soft,
or, at another level, of masculine or feminine material or art,
are questioned and rejected by the objects themselves: the objects
by Louise Bourgeois . . . [are] fascinating exactly because of their
structural openness (Schulte-Fischedick 114).

Building a Continuity: Remarks on Bourgeoiss

Life as a Source for Art
Many scholars who have conducted research and written on
Bourgeoiss art have concentrated on her own comments about
her childhood, her immigration experiences, and her creative
process. In the 1960s, these discussions were framed by a
sociopolitic environment of feminist movements, and thus put
Bourgeoiss life and art into a context of feminism and protest.
Psychoanalytic interpretations have been en vogue and were thus
enthusiastically applied to her artwork: Any matrix of interpretation for Bourgeoiss art must surely be drawn along the axes
of feminism and psychoanalysis . . . (Nixon qtd. in Hrtel 178).
What other axes could be taken into account, and does it make
sense to base an interpretation on axes that seem to be already
pre-established when her art is the complete opposite of a confirmation of established structures? The danger of practically
overseeing art-immanent themes in her work lies in directly transferring her own comments on Freud, Melanie Klein, or Lacan to
her artwork. Somehow, the combination of feminist and psychoanalytical concepts has led to paradoxical attempts to extract a
(political) meaning or psychosocial commentary out of the artifacts as in speaking with Anne Wagner, who writes, it is as if
making Bourgeoiss art useful has depended on relocating it on
biographical terrain (Wagner 6; Hrtel 204); or with Nixon, who
has interestingly observed that there is a countervailing appeal

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909

to unity at the level of biographical interpretation (Nixon qtd. in

Hrtel 204).
However, interpreting her objects of art in biographical terms
means being trapped in a circle of interpreting her art through
her own (poetic-reflexive) lens, which is in fact part of her artistic
production (Hrtel 179). Loreck put it right when complaining that the biographical is too often seen as an essence of art
and fixed parameter rather than as an instable construction,
a flexible reading with fictional background, which can in no
way be taken as a plain explanation of her artwork (Loreck
36).3 Thomas Kellein has discussed Bourgeoiss comprehensive
artistic work on the topic of family in the corresponding catalogue to the 2006 exhibition La famille in Bielefeld (Germany),
regarding concepts of family as intrinsically tied to those of
femininity. I would not support the idea of instantly linking
those concepts. One can easily agree with the statement that the
prevailing issue in her decade-long artistic examination is to create an autobiographical feminine cosmos whose complexity is
still inapprehensible (Kellein 16).4 Connections to her personal
life as a woman in specific tradition-based family constellations
can certainly be made when regarding, for example, her Femmes
Maisons drawings and objects. It is nonetheless still indispensible
to separate autobiographical remarks from a feminine cosmos
aroused in and by her art and based on (traditional, culturedependent) concepts of family. These interwoven topics are all
inherent to her art and somehow to her life, too, but an artistic cosmos can change its meanings in changing social and/or
exhibitional constellations independently of the artists private
life. It is a problematic simplification to say that everything
Bourgeois presents in her art since 1947 she experienced with her
family. This is the mystery of her art (Kellein 31).5 Of course,
such conclusions express a necessity of drawing out continuity
in Bourgeoiss artwork. While the mystery of her art may have
3

German original: Das Biograpische wird oft als Wahrheit begriffen, nicht als instabile
Konstruktion, nicht als flexible Lektre mit fiktionalem Charakter, sondern als Klartext.
4
German original: Es geht bei ihrer Jahrzehnte andauernden knstlerischen
Untersuchung um das Entwerfen eines autobiographischen weiblichen Kosmos, dessen
Komplexitt noch immer unfassbar ist.
5
German Original: Alles, was Bourgeois seit 1947 darstellt, hat sie mit ihrer Familie
erlebt. Das ist das Geheimnis ihrer Kunst.

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Katharina Eck

something to do with parameters of her life and her family experiences, it cannot be discovered or explained by these parameters
alone. In a knowledgeable essay from 2005, Julie Nicoletta rejects
a purely psychobiographic reading based on Freud and suggests
a new reading by emphasizing a connection between Lacan and
Bourgeoiss artthe subject of fierce debate among scholars. She
relativizes the euphory of Lacan as a key figure, but at the same
time argues that there are indeed structural similarities to be
taken into consideration. Following Nicolettas line of argument,
Bourgeois reaches other conclusions than Lacan, as the latter
sees sexual difference as grounded in a world in which the phallus is the transcendental signifier (Nicoletta 363). Notably, in
Lacans metonymic chain, we are trapped in a circle of signifiers
and signifieds with no single concrete meaning (Nicoletta 367).
Bourgeoiss art is very much about the limits of communication
and about ambivalence at a universal level, and that is why I would
support Nicolettas effort to link it to Lacans philosophy. The
Femmes Maisons are among the most striking examples in these
matters.
Although using psychoanalytical thinking as a critical method
to form a background for Bourgeoiss process of making art,
like Nicoletta claims, may seem fruitful for interpreting certain
objects, I would still not support a transfer of Lacanian theories alone as an appropriate method. A metonymic chain prevents
words or images from conveying an understanding of an ultimate
idea behind them, and this is what seems to happen in and with
Bourgeoiss art. However, it is not marked by a Lacanian eternal
suspension of meaning, as the objects in fact speak to the audience in their substantiality and their presence, even if an ultimate
idea or interpretation is impossible to grasp. With these considerations in mind, I will in the following try to approach the Femmes
Maisons.
Jumping Houses, Waving Arms, Torrential Lines: Bourgeoiss
Dramatic Visual Cosmos of Femmes Maisons
As I stated earlier, the imagery of housing, combined with female
body shapes, has dominated Bourgeoiss artistic production from
the beginning of her artistic life. She explicitly worked on these
themes in the medium of drawing and paintingin other words

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911

in a two-dimensional art formin the 1940s. I would like to refer

to five Femmes Maisons paintings that in fact all date from 1946/47,
with three of them presenting structural devices I have already
mentioned in relation to Uncontrollable Torrent. Figure 2 has a
face-like form with an opened mouth (hole) in its center, situated
on the top of a roof. Various curves grow out of it like hair; the
torrents around the bed in Uncontrollable Torrent strongly recall
these strangely curved lines. These lines reach to the sun which
is situated directly over the screaming (?) figure. The suns rays
mingle with the hair-lines and create an atmosphere of dynamics
and tension, especially when considering that there are more
round forms in the picture, above all the second sun on the right
of the chimney and the four holes in the face (forming mouth,
nose, and eyes), as well as an undefined bright hole within a black
trapeze at the left of the painting. Formally, these holes are all
set in a geometrical relation to each other, they even seem to
open another tetragon between them, crossed by the hair lines.
In Figure 3, the hair or torrent lines its colors strongly
resembling firecome out of a roofed house that replaces a
womans head. This is my first example of Bourgeoiss classical
Femmes Maisons combinations of house shapes with female body
parts. The femininity of the body is indicated with two breast
forms topped by the white, horizontally striped house with a door
and window opening that do not allow any view of what may
exist behind them. Instead, the prison-style of the house and the
fact that the womans faceand consequently any expression of

FIGURE 2 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison (Untitled), 1946/47.

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Katharina Eck

FIGURE 3 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 194547.

feelingsis not visible, lead to the conclusion that she might

be imprisoned by the house and robbed of her individuality. The
fire-like curves or torrents contribute to this dramatic impression.
She is contrasted to a red curtain and her sexual forces are
persuasively evoked by an egg-shaped color whirl placed inside
her body exactly where the uterus is located. Again, we can extract

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913

a certain tension in this arrangement, somewhat increased by

the strange flower based on a long stem, face to face with the
femme maison, growing from a pair of legs and contrasted by a
dark wall or curtain that reveals the legs but covers the rest of the
presumably second human figure. The flower hints at fecundity
and corresponds to the egg inside the woman. I see this arrangement, on the one hand, as possibly ironic commentary Bourgeois
adds to her own housing theme (a suggestion of a garden as
traditional supplement to a house) and, on the other hand, as
a complex visual code for the interference and simultaneity of
visibility and invisibility, fear and everyday life, hiding away and
being kept enclosedand also as accepting a social role (that of
a housewife in this context) and as rebelling against it. Tension is
aroused by the relation of the shapes to each other and also to the
semantical fields, which are ambiguous and cannot be interpreted
as clear symbols. Referring to the 1940s Femmes Maisons, Nicoletta
consequently poses the question Is Bourgeois suggesting here
womans acceptance of her place in society, or is she conveying the
tension that arises between contentment in domestic confinement
and a desire to break free of traditional roles? (366).
The same observations can be made when looking at the third
torrent-like Femme Maison painting (see Figure 4). This work
shows an even more erotic feminine body in front view placed
on a table-like base reminding one of an antique sculpture. The
form of its breasts mirrors the highlighted genitals, an oval form
between the legs, and likewise three undefined forms that perhaps refer to fruits or eggs, a bigger one on the table next to
the body, and two smaller ones in the center of the flames above
the house. The latter, in this case suggesting a neoclassical architecture, and thus with its columns and architrave reflecting the
antique sculptured body, is marked by ten little window openings
and two door-like holes that are not in the right position to allow
easy entrance. The flames once again erupt from the houses
roof, semantically enforcing an atmosphere of erotism and danger in a well-balanced contrast to the ideal body indicated in the
sculpture form and the symmetric neoclassical architecture.
These paintings have yet to demonstrate how Bourgeois
works with repetition and recontextualization of forms and
semantics: les signes prennent leur sens par la rptition et la
recontextualisation permanente (Badet 280). Signification is

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Katharina Eck

FIGURE 4 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 1946/47.

not fixed in one or few works of art, it rather varies depending

on the context of an exhibition and of the audiences point of
view. Thus, this kind of art seems to be invented for a permanent
reinventiona process that puts possible signification in question
as soon as it is perceived. The body-architecture deals with

Imagery in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

915

questions such as correspondence, the materiality of bodies and

their functions, and the feelings of buildings as made human
artefacts that give shelter, protect, enclose, even define roles
(of housewifes). Is a body a kind of architecture and what
would be the function of a female body? Muriel Badet expresses
the erotic implications of such a union of body and house:
Larchitectonique de lun rpond la corporit de lautre. Lun
et lautre se pntrent: ils sunissent pour ne construire quune
seule et mme entit; ils squilibrent dans ce nouvel tre . . . .
(Badet 278f). This union and the prospects of producing a new
being, ce nouvel tre, could also be regarded a code for artistic
creativity. Bourgeoiss Femmes Maisons need not be considered a
pure reactivation of the past, ractivation du pass, or visualization of a mothers house, maison mre, as Badet puts it
(284), although this interpretation is of course not unlikely either.
The title of Gabriele Oberreuter-Kronabels essay in a
2001 anthology, Besetzte Huser, which means occupied
houses, suggests more connotations: the question is, are these
anthropomorphed houses really occupied or taken, and can
this situation be understood as a transitory state in the sense
that there is a female inhabitant or guest inside, or maybe in a
more military sense, that the house is actually taken by force?
Or vice versa, are the bodies taken by the houses? Neither is the
relation between the taken/taking object and the taken/taking
(female) subject well defined, nor can a woman-house actually be
regarded as an identifiable thing. It thus invites the audience to
question common concepts of subjectivity, and highlights the
problematic distinction between passiveness and activity people
tend to make with regard to mens and womens qualities. Is housing a passive state of being, and is occupying a house a more
active alternative solution to that, and can hence the first situation be related to a female subjectivity and the latter to a male
one? The dichotomies of active-passive behavior and of acting by
force-enduring something seem to be too ambiguous to be supported, and consequently obsolete; the woman-house thing seems
to break rigid frameworks and to open up new perspectives.
The idea behind the woman-houses is very organic, similar to
Bourgeoiss eruptive Cumuls or energetic torrents; they imply that
forces are artistically in tension with each other, and that these
forces obviously emerge from erotic, procreative situations that

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Katharina Eck

are evoked by Bourgeoiss specific visual vocabulary. Certainly

the forces could be indications of a psychological process as
wellI would only hesitate to draw the conclusion that the
woman-houses are a symbol of Bourgeoiss own memories,
phantasies, and obsessions, that have invaded the architecture to
be banned (Oberreuter-Kronabel 332f) I also doubt that there is
a kind of vengeful artistic reflex in the repeated enhancement
of corporal willingness of women towards men (OberreuterKronabel 331),6 as the erotic tendencies in the artwork need not
inevitably express such willingness.
I see Bourgeoiss woman-house constructions as an artistic
reflection upon themes that touch semantical fields of actionpassiveness, (sexual) surrender and abandonment or loneliness,
and identification with (gender) categories versus their deconstruction or complete denial. A decision or definite choice is
never made by Bourgeois. Instead of a construction of stable and
fully functional buildings, she opts for anthropomorphed hybrids.
In later works she does not link houses directly to femininity anymore, but the emotional instability inherent to her woman-houses
of the 1940s is nonetheless still apparent. The latter express
intense feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and fearespecially
the two I have not yet mentioned. One of them is more maison
than femme (Figure 5): it is not gendered at first glance, but indicates female genitals at its bottom. The house, skyscraper-like,
jumps on cartoon-like legs as three arms are stretched out from
it, waving like giving signals to the spectator. Its six lighted windows are supplemented by three dark openings, the biggest one
suggesting a door to which some steps lead. The rather desperate
gestures of this house, in combination with the exposed female
genital, arouse feelings of vulnerability, but also a strange longing
to enter this sparsely lighted and opened, rather uninviting and
dusky building. Interestingly, the waving hand is another repeated
feature, which can be found in two more woman-house constructions: another one from 1946/47 (see Figure 6) exposes the lower
part of a female body, with very huge hips and again an implied
female genital. The house merges into her body, presenting a
more complex structure than the other houses, as it has two stories
6
Following the German original, a rchender knstlerischer Reflex in der hufigen
Betonung krperlicher Bereitwilligkeit von Frauen dem Mann gegenber.

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917

FIGURE 5 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 1946/47.

fitting into the body shape and four stories plus the roof put above
it; moreover, two curves in the third story indicate the womans
breasts to which the stairs of the house directly lead. This drawing
broaches even more than the others I already regarded the issue
of a female body being invaded by the architecture, the latter

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Katharina Eck

FIGURE 6 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 1946/47.

not having any protective function at all. The right armon the
left of the drawingis waving at the spectator.
Interestingly, Bourgeois took up this waving-imagery in the
1980s, humorously using a Barbie plastic doll and replacing its
body and face by a skyscraper model made of clay (1982) (see

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919

FIGURE 7 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 1982.

Figure 7). The dolls hair, arms, and legs are stretched out of the
clay house and the left arm is put high up in a waving gesture. All
of the described Femmes Maisons do not lack a certain humor, one
in its jumping position, the other with the breast within a houses

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Katharina Eck

story, hidden but demonstrative. The Barbie object is even more

ironic in its implications, as Barbie dolls have, since their invention in the early 1960s, been a controversial but successfully sold
toy that merges notions of consumption with those of an assumed
perfect female body. Here, the body curves are replaced by the
building, linking this object to the earlier Femmes Maisons, and
I wish to emphasize the door-indicating slit at the height where
the female genitals are normally located. In various arrangements,
Bourgeois puts concepts of housing, home, and domesticityas
a traditionally female domainin relation to erotism, exposure,
and suppression. While home is normally a place of communication, social interaction, and orientation, these themes are
completely fractured in all of the Femmes Maisons variations.
Orientation and clear definitions are denied, so what Bourgeoiss
art expresses is a kind of Alice in Wonderland-experience.
Roomy Bodies and Fragments of Femininityand
an Effort of an Indefinite Conclusion
Marie Darrieussecq has published a fictional text (1998) that
is in fact a poetic reflection upon Bourgeoiss artistic concerns
and is titled Louises House. It appears in an appendix of the
Bordeaux exhibition catalogue. Therein, the first-person narrator
starts to express her feelings by evoking the medical procedure
of putting boiling glass jars on a patients skinthe ventouses,
which are another one of Bourgeoiss artistic images. It is stated
then: Im familiar with that body, Ive lived in it. It has several
storeys (Darrieussecq 3). Bit by bit, images of wounds and pain
are poetically referenced and the reader is never sure about the
setting, but apparently simultaneously inside a house and a body.
Body and house are consequently tied together as one, using
the metaphor that the body is very roomy (Darrieussecq 4).
This image reminds one of Bachelards result in The Poetics of
Space, that room and house are psychological diagrams that guide
writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy (Bachelard 6;
Nicoletta 371). Applying this idea to Bourgeoiss Femmes Maisons
and likewise to many other of her pieceswould facilitate an
unprejudiced reading of them, as psychological diagrams that
are not inevitably identical with the artists psyche or memories,
but that also contain traces of (geometrical) constructions. The

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921

latter somehow subdivide the (psychic) room and try to bring

order to an otherwise chaotic place. Room is simultaneously an
outward appearance that can of course be uncommon, unknown,
or uncomfortable, and a psychic dimension, both not clearly separable. Now, the statement that geometry becomes a metaphor
for the work of cognition . . . (Werner 94) gains another level
of relevance. Darrieussecq transfers Bourgeoiss visual strategies
into a literary reflection, trying to achieve an effect similar to
that which Bourgeoiss images provoke with words. Darrieussecq
also deals with themes of alienation and searching, describing a
patient trapped in a houseor a body, her body?who is forced
to go on a strange exploration tour and to find out whether she
should arrange herself in the situation and identify with it, or
rebel against it. This situation strongly recalls Alice in Wonderland,
in that Alice is a teenager on her way to discovering her identity
and her place in the world and is at first thrown into an unrecognizable building with a garden outside and then tries to leave the
place while her body constantly changes its form. Alices relation
to the surrounding things is marked by insecurity and attempts to
determine the next step. Of course, the Alice storyline is about
adolescence, but I see parallels to the Bourgeois imagery and its
reinterpretation in the Darieussecq text. The women, or in other
words the fragments of them, that appear there, are confused with
buildings and with the assignment linked to them. The images in
the text all come from Bourgeoiss art and mostly from the Femmes
Maisons motives. The window-openings appear and so does the
question of longing either to get outside or to stay inside: There
are a great many windows . . . but its hard to see outside. I havent
left the house in a long time. Sometimes I look for the door, but
Im afraid of falling (Darieussecq 4). Words from Bourgeoiss
titles appear, like falling that named a painting, Fallen woman.
The first-person narrator strays around, what else could I do, in
the house, except move around and try to discover new rooms?
(Darieussecq 5).
Is the house habitable or is the womans body habitable?
This question also seems to link the Femmes Maisons and the text.
There is a battle to determine who will dominate in the end, who
can make decisions, and who is responsible for the housewifes
tasks: . . . so who does the housework here? (Darieussecq 5).

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Katharina Eck

Moreover, the surroundings in the building are described as completely organic, in accordance with Bourgeoiss art: Sometimes I
put my hand to the wall, to see whether its beating like some large
organ with nerves and veins under its sleek surface (Darieussecq
5). After a while, the texts protagonist begins to understand how
the round knobs germinate, how breasts interpenetrate, how spirals intertwine . . . She concludes And I contribute to the physics
of their geometry. I am mistress of the house (Darieussecq 9).
This continuance of the text is quite remarkable, if one reads it as
an approach to understanding Bourgeoiss art: What does it mean
to be mistress of a house that physically becomes part of you, and
to contribute to its geometry? Did the house invade the body, or
vice versa? Darieussecqs text is an interesting poetic description
of the world Bourgeois has visuallyand geometricallybuilt.
Female artists today seem to make others readopt their
(visual) vocabulary. Their artwork will not lead to any definite
interpretationbut instead to new questions. Signification is circulating and it cannot be fixed, and women artists pose questions
concerning the role of women within different settingsfamily,
career, art worldand also toward objects, as communication and
learning not only happens between subjects, but also between
subjects and the objects they confront. Bourgeoiss art work and
the art world is all about communication, interaction, and the
(im)possibilities of self-positioning. It reactivates old images and
presents them anew in a different style or material shell. For example, another Femme Maison version from 2005 is made of cloth
and shows a female corpus with a little house on top of its womb,
suggesting a pregnant women figure, that has always been part of
Bourgeoiss imagery (see Figure 8). Her womb and breasts build a
landscape, so that the house is located in front of a kind of mountain range. Body-landscapes and tissues that contrast Bourgeoiss
more inflexible materials are part of her creative work. The Femme
Maison imagery also entered the cloth material-experiments of
Bourgeois and the tapestry of her memories (as she has been raised
in a tapestry manufacture, KE) is being woven and rewoven in an
eternal recommencement (Bernadac 19). The standard female
body, as a wholeness, or even an entity, is rejected in favor of
some parts of ithighly suggestive and erotically charged parts,
to be sure. But there are only fragments of an identifiable reality,

Imagery in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

923

FIGURE 8 Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison, 2005.

and the categories of artsculpture, painting, performance

have long ago become blurred (see Jahn 1997). Forms and lines
penetrate bodies, which penetrate housesconversions of outside
and inside are indicated, and space becomes the metaphor of
desire (Kristeva qtd. in Morris 252). But despite of all the difficulties one is confronted with when trying to grasp the meaning
of Bourgeoiss artwork and her Femmes Maisons, it is useful to
know that in her work repetition creates structure (Storr 43).
The polysemy of repeated images of isolation, disturbed communication or lonelinessthat strikingly imply other images/feelings
like those of fecundity or vitalityforms her proliferous archive
(Fricke 31) and in fact, the Femmes Maisons are a crucial part of it.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: The Viking Press, 1964.
Badet, Muriel. Louise Bourgeois, femme maisonConstruire, dconstruire,
reconstruire la maison. La Maison de lArtiste. Rennes 2007, 277285.
Bernadac, Marie-Laure. Behind the tapestry. exh. cat. Louise BourgeoisOeuvres
rcentes/recent works. Bordeaux: capc Muse dart contemporain de Bordeaux:
1998, 1519.
Darrieussecq, Marie. Louises house. exh. cat. Louise BourgeoisOeuvres
rcentes/recent works. Bordeaux: capc Muse dart contemporain de Bordeaux:
1998.

924

Katharina Eck

Fricke, Harald. Adults and Other ChildrenSubliminal Humor in the Works

of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois: Intimate Abstractions. Ed. Beatrice
E. Stammer, Kathrin Becker, Antje Weizel, and Valeria Schulte-Fischedick.
Berlin: Akademie der Kuenste, 2003, 2733.
Gorovoy, Jerry. The Iconography of Louise Bourgeois exh. cat., New York: Max
Hutchinson Gallery, 1980.
Hrtel, Insa. Brutale Interventionen: The Destruction of the Father (Louise
Bourgeois). Symbolische Ordnungen umschreiben. Autoritt, Autorschaft und
Handlungsmacht. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
Jahn, Andrea. The Artist giving Birth to Herself : Louise Bourgeois schwangere
Krper. Mythen von Autorschaft und Weiblichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Kathrin
Hoffmann-Curtius and Silke Wenk. Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1997, 206220.
Kellein, Thomas. Louise BourgeoisLa famille. exh. cat. (Kunsthalle Bielefeld),
Koeln: Koenig, 2006.
Keller, Eva and Regula Malin. Emotions AbstractedWorks 19412000. exh. cat.
(Zrich/Davos Collections), Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004.
Lammert, Angela. Moments of DurationNotes on the Works on paper. Louise
Bourgeois: Intimate Abstractions. Ed. Beatrice E. Stammer, Kathrin Becker, Antje
Weizel, and Valeria Schulte-Fischedick. Berlin: Akademie der Kuenste, 2003,
6575.
Loreck, Hanne. The Indiscreet Space or Perfume with the Scent of Feet. Louise
Bourgeois: Intimate Abstractions. Ed. Beatrice E. Stammer, Kathrin Becker, Antje
Weizel, and Valeria Schulte-Fischedick. Berlin: Akademie der Kuenste, 2003,
3545.
Louise Bourgeois au Centre Pompidou. Beaux Arts Magazine. Paris: Beaux Arts, 2008.
Morris, Frances. Louise Bourgeois. exh. cat. London: Tate Modern, 2007.
Nicoletta, Julie. Louise Bourgeoiss Femmes-Maisons, Confronting Lacan.
Reclaiming Female Agency, Feminist Art History After Postmodernism. Ed. Norma
Broude and Mary D. Garrard. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of
California Press, 2005, 361371.
Oberreuter-Kronabel, Gabriele. Besetzte HuserBeobachtungen zu Louise
Bourgeois. Zwischen den Welten, Beitrge zur Kunstgeschichte fr Jrg Meyer zur
Capellen. Ed. Damian Dombrowski. Weimar: VDG, 2001, 328334.
Schulte-Fischedick, Valeria. Sensual Counterculture and Anti FormsLouise
Bourgeois in the Context of the 1960s. Louise Bourgeois: Intimate Abstractions.
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Storr, At the Edge of Night, Emotions AbstractedWorks 19412000.
Wagner, Anne M. Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies. Oxford Art
Journal 22.2 (1999): 323.
Werner, Gabriele. Destruction(s) of the Mathematical Model. Louise Bourgeois:
Intimate Abstractions. Ed. Beatrice E. Stammer, Kathrin Becker, Antje Weizel,
and Valeria Schulte-Fischedick. Berlin: Akademie der Kuenste, 2003, 8795.
Wye, Deborah. Louise Bourgeois. exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982.

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