POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Louise Bourgeois: Ode to Forgetting, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is on view January 24 – April 5, 2020 at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the only venue on the East Coast to host these works.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth century, perhaps best known for powerful sculptures, including monumental spiders, human figures, and anthropomorphic shapes. An enigmatic chronicler of her emotions, she made drawings daily, and returned regularly to printmaking. The exhibition includes eighty-seven works and focuses on prints she made in her eighties and nineties, with a few earlier examples and a massive spiral sculpture to give additional context.

Many of the prints incorporate or replicate fabrics, reflecting a lifelong interest in textiles connected to Bourgeois’s childhood years in the Paris suburbs, where her family lived and had their on-site tapestry restoration business. For more than ninety years, Bourgeois made drawings daily, beginning in childhood and continuing until her death at age ninety-eight. She made art because she had to, and described her practice as a means of survival, a lifelong managing of emotional vulnerabilities, traumas, and nightmares. As she put it, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”

“Following the success of the 2017 exhibition Fluid Expressions, Prints of Helen Frankenthaler, from the Collections of Jordan D Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, we are thrilled to partner once again with Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center to share rarely exhibited fabric, books and prints by Louise Bourgeois,” said Jordan D Schnitzer. “This powerful exhibition exemplifies the artist’s tireless creative process and her relentless pursuit of themes of the body, nature, and emotional trauma.”

The exhibition is divided among three galleries, with the body the first major theme and an enduring subject for this revered artist. The introductory room displays versions of the female body under psychological siege and a series of signature spider prints that are allegorical in nature. The first gallery also features Bourgeois’s five prints of the Crochet series, where the resilience theme one sees in her images of the female body and spider has now been abstracted and reduced to symbols and shapes through the act of weaving, twisting, and knotting material.

In the second gallery, the body becomes the chief player again, though now there are two or more bodies involved, usually couples, but also a mother and child, and a significant amount of abstraction. Here in ebullient prints and a large aluminum sculpture the spiral appears as a prominent motif and suggests the literal intertwining and enveloping nature of relationships. The theme of memory features in this middle gallery as well. At the beginning of her ninetieth decade, in 2002, Bourgeois constructed Ode à l'Oubli (Ode to Forgetting), her first fabric book, compiled from her garments and linens that she had kept over a lifetime. The linen came from sixty-year-old monogrammed hand towels from her trousseau. Working from one page to the next, Bourgeois cut and arranged pieces from silk, nylon, rayon, and other fabrics to form color collages. The original, unique Ode à l'Oubli is both personal artifact and a cathartic object of transformation. For the artist, finding temporary peace from plaguing anxieties was reached through making art such as this that entailed habitual handwork, as in other works on view. The unbound work shown in the exhibition duplicates that unique book, using vintage textiles, state-of-the-art lithography, and fabric-dying processes, and is a marvel stretching the limits of printmaking.

The third and last gallery presents the sequential Hours of the Day, from 2006, a print series surrounding the theme of time. Printed on fabric with rhythmic bars of lines referencing sheet music, each panel features an abstracted, twenty-four-hour printed clock pointing to the time of day, along with a title or saying, sometimes cryptic, sometimes confessional, taken from her diaries. Somewhat reminiscent of a medieval book of hours with written prayers for each hour, the series suggests that living in the past was a preoccupation of her time, though wanting to forgive and forget and live in the present was a real desire, as she noted on an earlier, related drawing for this series.

At age seventy Bourgeois was the first woman to be accorded a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Honored with numerous exhibitions, in 2007, a full-career retrospective premiered at the Tate Modern, London, and toured to Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art premiered Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait exploring the prints, books, and creative process of this celebrated artist.

Louise Bourgeois: Ode to Forgetting, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, in collaboration with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.