'Louise Bourgeois': Transforming Pain Into Art

Louise Bourgeois -- the French-born, New York-based artist whose sculpture is the subject of a thoughtful and thorough retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden -- turned 97 this past Christmas. She doesn't like to travel, but she still gets to the studio.

At an age when many are seeking, or have long since achieved, psychological closure, sealing up the wounds of the past, the artist can't seem to stop picking at some pretty old scabs. Her father, for instance, slept with a household employee over a period of 10 years beginning when the artist was 11, leading to a sense of double betrayal: first by her father; and second by the young woman, who was only six years older than Bourgeois and considered a friend.

This was 1922 to 1932. In 1974, Bourgeois made a sculptural installation piece called "The Destruction of the Father," in which she visualized butchering her father's body (he died in 1951) into chunks of meat. Bathed in theatrical red lighting, that latex-and-plaster diorama is included in the show. It's grisly but also makes you think some kid went a little crazy with the Play-Doh.

So how exactly does Bourgeois expect her scars to heal when she won't leave them alone? The answer is: She doesn't. She'd much rather make art from them.

"Louise Bourgeois" covers a career of more than 60 years, from the mid-1940s to 2008. It takes up all of the museum's second floor and part of the outdoor plaza, where a 27-foot-wide bronze spider from one of the artist's most iconic series of works (you'll find another one in the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden) guards the front door.

There's a world of pain on display here. Browse through the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, which is written like a glossary of symptoms and source material, and you'll find such alphabetized entries as "Abandonment," "Aggression," "Agoraphobia," "Anger" and "Anxiety." And that's just the A's. There are also entries on "Calm," "Dreams, "Music" and "Reparation."

Nothing about Bourgeois's art, it seems, is straightforward or easy.

In that abecedarian spirit, we hereby offer our own ABCs: a primer that will serve as an introduction to a few of the big ideas you'll encounter in Bourgeois' art.

A IS FOR AMBIVALENCE

Bourgeois loves ambiguity.

As curator Valerie Fletcher puts it, the artist is unusually comfortable with things that are "labile." That is to say, things whose meaning or interpretation are in a constant state of flux.

Take that jungle-gym-size "Crouching Spider" by the museum entrance. For most of us, an arachnid of that size comes across as a little, well, creepy. Not to Bourgeois. She associates the creature's web-spinning ability with her own mother's work as a weaver in the family tapestry restoration business, insisting that the image of a giant spider isn't something nightmarish at all but a nurturing maternal figure.

So far so good. She has also spoken of how spiders remind her -- stay with me now -- of prostitutes. Just like spiders, see, women of the night are furtive and delicate, according to Bourgeois.