Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral and Louise 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.

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,

Bourgeois would return to the femme maison throughout her career, exploring women's imprisonment in a "home" that was both a cage and the maternal body. Like American woman writers in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly Carson McCullers and Shirley Jackson, both agoraphobic, the artist was drawing upon the literary genre of the female Gothic, in which a young woman seeks out a secret inner room, which is the source of mysteries, including birth and death. As Anne Sexton wrote in her poem Housewife, the house was the female body, endlessly requiring maintenance, trapping the female artist in her biology.

It is easy for us to make the connection in Spider to this motif, as the spider is stretched out in a way that its legs form a house. We can sit underneath it and feel safe, while looking out through its legs at the outside world.

It is also worthwhile to consider the psychoanalytic aspect of Sky Cathedral, which becomes apparent in Nevelson's use of boxes - traditionally a symbol of the vagina. This use of psychoanalytic symbolism unites the two sculptures as works responding to the intellectual mythologies of the 20th century.

Conclusion

Louise Bourgeois's Spider and Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral can readily be seen as hallmarks in feminist art. While both sculptures avoid the didactic strategies typically associated with the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, imbedded within each one may discover a message both primal and political about women's role in nature and society.