Nevelson and Bourgeois Bourgeois\'s Spider

Nevelson and Bourgeois

Bourgeois's Spider & Nevelson's Sky Cathedral: A Comparative Analysis

Louise Nevelson. (1899-1988). Sky Cathedral. 1958. Painted wood. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Louise Bourgeois. (1911-). Spider. 1996-1997. Bronze. National Gallery of Art.

In the story of feminism's entanglement with modern art in the United States, two names overshadow many others: they are Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson. Both women have made their mark primarily in the field of sculpture.

Bourgeois was born to France and came to the United States in the late 1930s, where she has lived ever since. Bourgeois's work is known for being heavily symbolic and abstract. The main focus of Bourgeois's work is on relationships - in particular, the relationships of her sculptures to the spaces in which they are situated. On a more personal level, much of the work is about the artist's own relationship with her mother and father. Bourgeois continues to make sculpture well into her 90s.

Like Bourgeois, Nevelson was a European-born artist who spent most of her life living and working in America. She made her mark on American sculpture during the Abstract Expressionist movement. Nevelson used found objects of every day materials in her artwork. She would group together these objects, or boxes, in order to form assemblages - many of which were enormous in size and scale. Nevelson passed away in New York in 1988 at the age of 89.

In this essay, I will focus on one representative large-scale work from each artist. In the case of Bourgeois, I will consider her sculpture, Spider, from the National Gallery of Art. Nevelson's most famous work is her Sky Cathedral, currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I will analyze the formal qualities of each of these works before moving on to a comparative analysis. Then, I will consider each work's position in a wider art historical and cultural context. I intend to show how each of these two works challenges traditional notions of the "feminine" in positing new ideas of what it means to be female in the 20th century.

Louise Bourgeois's Spider

One of Louise Bourgeois's more famous Spider sculptures is installed on a grassy lawn in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The spider seems to be stretching out its eight legs, fully claiming as much of the empty lawn that it can, without being so rude as to trample the surrounding plants - or intrude on the sidewalk nearby that allows visitors to pass by it. The rust-colored bronze legs of the spider end in knife-sharp protrusions, which dig into the surrounding lawn. It is a frightening sculpture - the type of thing you would expect to find in the nightmare of a young child.

Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral

Louise Nevelson's famous sculpture Sky Cathedral consists of around sixty boxes of different sizes, that together form a wall of over eleven feet in height and ten feet in width. The boxes are painted black and form an uneven shape. Each of the boxes is filled with different objects of varying shapes and sizes. Seen in the context of the museum, the sculpture looks precious - it is as though it might collapse at any moment. This produces a feeling of anxiety in the viewer - a feeling that is difficult to overcome. Although we realize that it is a solid sculpture, we do not want to stand too close to it for fear that it might break and fall on us. The fact that it is made out of wood, rather than traditional sculptural materials such as marble or brass, gives the sculpture a feeling of rough aggression.

Comparison

As is made clear by our formal analysis of the two sculptures above, both works resist common definitions of the feminine. It could even be said that they appropriate traditional "masculine" qualities - aggression, confrontation, frightfulness, and rage. On further investigation, however, it becomes apparent that each of the artists has infused these typically "masculine" qualities with the feminine. This is especially true in terms of the sheer scale of each of the sculptures. As Whitney Chadwick has noted, women's attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.

In the two sculptures discussed here, Bourgeois and Nevelson prove that they are equal to the task provided by the male-dominated realm of art history. In doing so, they have created two of the more innovative and confrontational works of feminist art of the 20th century.

The spider is a recurring motif in the work of Bourgeois. The spider installed at the National Gallery in Washington is one of many that she has made in her career. Bourgeois uses the spider to represent the figure of the mother - a person she loves dearly, but also has mixed feelings about. Unlike Bourgeois's sculpture, which can be viewed from any angle, Sky Cathedral is more like a painting, in that it is intended to be viewed from the front only.

The Sculptures in Context

Sky Cathedral can readily be seen to fit in with the tradition of Abstract Expressionist painting in America; indeed, it was executed in the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism as a movement was in full swing. What is unusual, of course, is the fact that it is not a painting at all, but a sculpture. Still, one sees traces of the influence of Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and other artists who used a large-scale "all over" form of expression in their works. At the same time, one sees traces of the Cubist influence in this sculpture, as well. This is due to the interplay of contrasting lines and shapes throughout the sculpture. There is also a touch of Surrealism in the sculpture, comparable to the boxes of Joseph Cornell.

The work of Bourgeois has traditionally been aligned with the Surrealist movement in France. At the same time, works like Spider show that Bourgeois does not so easily fit in to this category. Having been completed in the late 1990s, long after Surrealism reigned as a major movement, the sculpture is imbued with a sense of timelessness that severs it from all of the major artistic movements of the previous century. The sculpture is monumental in its design and its installation in the Sculpture Garden gives it a heightened significance. It shows Bourgeois's interest in classic psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and phobias - especially how such theories have been deployed over the years as a means of keeping women "in line." The spider is an insect one typically finds in the home. Home has traditionally been the domain of women, as well. As Elaine Showalter has written,