What Next Louise...

I was excited to get to the Guggenheim to see the Queen of the Art Scene, Louise Bourgeois's
retrospective. As I walked by the south side of the museum I noticed they are starting to take down the scaffolding that has hidden the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece for far too long. On the ground floor was a spider from Louise's "Maman" series and probably what she is best known for. As I read the opening statements about the show I was disappointed to see that the curators in their greater wisdom decided to go against Wright's inclination and make the viewer walk up the ramp instead of slowly floating down the spiral if you wanted to see the works of Bourgeois's work timeline from the beginning to end. I grumbled under my breath and began my plodding upward. The first of the works are the noble totems that represented Louise's friends and family way back in the 1940's. It's interesting to note that when the Guggenheim was finished in 1959 Bourgeois was in mid-career and already a world famous artist. Now almost a centenarian she is still creating masterpieces. Halfway up the ramp and the centerpiece of show is her, Destruction Of The Father, an installation bathed in crimson, a tableau that includes a table of soft sculptures that appear to be appendages and organs and in reality that's what it is, the back story of the piece as Bourgeois suggests is a father devoured by his children that he has tortured during their lives. Like all of her pieces there is always a little of her life included and her father wasn't exactly her favorite person. The end of the show is mostly "The Cells"; these are pieces that are constructed to be rooms that Louise describes as 'representing different types of pain'. They may represent pain but most are very beautiful in a stark kind of way. And at the top of the show are some of Bourgeois's most recent works that represent her going back to her roots of mending tapestries in the family business. The new work are sewn fabrics in dynamic ways to create calming aesthetics. As I stood atop the spiral looking down at the floor below and feeling a bit of vertigo I had an epiphany that perhaps the curators inspired by having to walk up the ramp, it was an important element that was represented and that was that a great life is like walking up a hill and looking down at the work that Bourgeois had created in the last century was staggering and then finally the realization that one of the greatest artists of all time is still amongst us is liberating...