Per Contra: Kuspit on Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture

Per Contra Contributing Editor Donald Kuspit explores the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois in the Fall 2007 issue, with an essay that places the work in an analytical context:

"More signficantly, at least to me, Bourgeois’s sculptures have the aura of uncanniness that abstract art had when it was new and unfamiliar, an uncanniness it inevitably lost when it became à la mode establishment art. It lost its soul--what Kandinsky called its inner necessity--as it became matter-of-fact: “positivist,” as Clement Greenberg called it, that is, simply a “statement” of the “formal facts” (line, color, shape). More pointedly, it lost what G. Albert Aurier, the great Symbolist critic and theorist, called “the transcendental emotivity, so grand and precious, that makes the soul tremble before the pulsing drama of the abstractions.”(3) I think Bourgeois restores inner necessity--inner grandeur—to abstraction, by way of what I want to call her “transcendental viscerality.” She distills the body to its organic essence, focuses bodiliness in pure abstract form, concentrates it so that it seems ultra-autonomous." - Read the Complete Essay

Per Contra Visual Arts Fall 2007