From the historic to the histrionic

NY retrospective explores work of Louise Bourgeois

NEW YORK - Louise Bourgeois, the 96-year-old sculptor born in Paris and resident in New York, has achieved great things. But to her legions of fans today, her work appeals in the same way that melodrama appeals, and with the same problems: a glut of emotion, a surfeit of plot; a sensation of wallowing in effects long after the cause has been forgotten.

In this regard, surprisingly, Bourgeois has herself to blame. For decades she remained tight-lipped about the meanings of her work and the motivations behind it. Then, in the wake of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art - the first retrospective at that museum given to a woman - everything changed.

In particular, she made public the early trauma of her father's affair with her English nanny, her mother's complicity, and her own feelings of betrayal. (She adored her cruel father, had adopted her nanny as a friend, and was enlisted by her mother as both chaperone and spy.)

The story became a kind of creation myth, which Bourgeois continued to supplement with psychologically charged reminiscences and elaborate explanations of her work's symbolic content.

Art, she frankly admitted, was for her a way of staving off extremes of anxiety. Sculpture became her chosen medium because it seemed the best outlet for aggression. It allowed her "to express what I was embarrassed to express before."

Enlightening though much of this was, the upshot was that Bourgeois's fearless sculpture came to be swaddled in a rhetoric of anxiety. Critics began to detect a "morbid manner" in her work and questioned her inclination to regard art as a form of therapy, a way of getting through the day.

It would be nice to dismiss this kind of disapproval as a failure of imagination, a preference for what is tasteful over the truth behind life's emotional extremes. But the Guggenheim Museum's Bourgeois retrospective in New York, impressive in so many ways, nonetheless demonstrates real weaknesses in her oeuvre. They are worth acknowledging, not least because Bourgeois has been lionized by younger generations of artists, who take her example as a validation of their own tendencies toward narcissistic self-revelation.

On the one hand, the show provides an opportunity to marvel. Ninety-six and still going strong, Bourgeois deserves her accolades. But if the scale of her accomplishment is not in doubt, one's responses to her work have to contend with persistent obstruction. I came out of the show hugely stimulated but strangely unsatisfied. Too many of the early works look arbitrary and imprecise; too many of the later ones are overburdened with metaphor and symbol. In between are works that are simply histrionic.

And yet of course there are many great things, and the highlight of the early part of the show is a spare but evocative sculpture - one of five variants Bourgeois eventually made - called "The Blind Leading the Blind." The version here is constructed from 20 pink wooden beams, arranged vertically and in strict formation, tapering to blades at the base and joined at the top by horizontals. The construction is disciplined and tight. Its sinister connotations (those tapering legs that sit so delicately on the floor also threaten to puncture it) are kept in check by the piece's formal restraint, its muteness.

The emphasis in this first part of the show is on drawings and paintings (Bourgeois gave up painting in 1949; her style was gauche and direct, as it still is in drawing) as well as a series of vertical wooden sculptures, called "Personages," which she made between 1945 and 1955.

Slender and tall (between 3 and 6 feet), these were made at her apartment in New York, where she had moved from France in 1938 following her marriage to art historian Robert Goldwater. Intended to be shown together, the "Personages" suggest ad hoc, oddly frozen family groupings. They also evoke something of Manhattan's vertically stacked cityscape (part of Bourgeois's studio was on the roof).

Yet they are oddly nerveless. Lacking the abstract refinement of, say, Brancusi, they remain too abstract and minimal to evoke the fetishistic force of tribal totems.

They do, however, anticipate an interest in stacked and accumulated forms with which Bourgeois persisted in works that suggest, more than anything, the fragility of verticality. (Like everything here, this "interest" is linked in the catalog with a Bourgeois anxiety - in this case, basophobia, or the fear of falling.)

Bourgeois's sculpture is intensely exploratory. Her experimental approach to form and material is her greatest asset. After playing, for instance, with vertical sculptures made from stacked wooden blocks (for example, "Untitled," 1950), she might shift the blocks slightly until she has a vertically rising spiral ("Spiral Woman," 1951-52).

From there, she seeks to evoke fragility in space not by stacking things up but by letting them hang from above (for example, "Fée Couturière," 1963). And then, in yet another jump of instinctual logic, she explores the shape of things as they might appear after falling (see, for example, the wonderful series of small, cow pat-like works made from plastic, plaster, carved alabaster, or latex titled "Soft Landscapes").

The sense of theme and variation is riveting, and it's matched by an equally exploratory treatment of materials, from the rough facture of resin and hemp to the glassy smoothness of marble and alabaster. Given the centrality of spiraling forms to Bourgeois's oeuvre, it's marvelously apt that you register these developments, which continually reach back to earlier forms even as they progress, as you ascend the spiraling interior of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim.

In terms of form, Bourgeois is at her best when the variations veer toward the abstract and her shapes evoke, rather than illustrate, the forms of the body. Her more explicitly figurative works, whether in bronze, marble, or stuffed fabric, lose force. This is partly because Bourgeois's modeling is clumsy - dumbly literal with occasional arbitrary distortions - but also because the pieces lose the rich ambiguity that animates the more abstracted pieces.

The notorious sculptures describing genitalia are exceptions. "Fillette," for instance, which became Bourgeois's best known work after Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her holding the piece under her arm like a handbag or a swaddled baby, is - unmistakably - an erect penis with two testes. But its surface is a fascinating combination of scumbled and glistening-smooth, and its ugly, outsize power is perfectly balanced by its fragility in space (it hangs by a hook).

Because the rise of her reputation coincided with the rise of feminism, much ink has been spilled over Bourgeois's feminist credentials (her statements on the subject are completely contradictory). But whatever her politics, she claims to feel protective toward the male phallus - and looking at "Fillette," or the superb sculptures of phalluses in retreat, such as "Janus" and "Sleep II," one has no trouble believing it.

Bourgeois stopped exhibiting for 11 years after her father's death in 1957. In 1974, she made a multi-part sculpture, placed behind a proscenium and luridly lit, called "The Destruction of the Father." The piece, based on a family dinner-table scenario, is an absurdly theatrical flop, and a preview of some of the worst excesses to come.

But before those, in the 1980s, Bourgeois made a series of bravura, highly finished sculptures in marble. One of the best of them, called "Femme Maison," (from 1983, not to be confused with the much weaker "Femme Maison" of 1994) was carved to resemble a heap of billowing drapery with a small, rectilinear building emerging from the top. Looking at it, you have a sense of the terrible futility that can come to inhabit the clothes and shelters designed to protect us.

Bourgeois spent much of the 1990s making installations that she referred to as "Cells." "I wanted to create my own architecture, and not depend on the museum space," she explained. The problem with these pieces, which take up much of the upper half of the Guggenheim's spiraling exhibition space, is that they are over-elaborated.

Bourgeois blocks our access to their contents, forcing us to peek through windows and gaps in the partitions, hoping to create a sense of menace and portent. But the ingredients inside are so many and so various - hanging clothes, small spiders, spiraling staircases, mirrors, mannequins, stools, and sculpted body parts - that trying to interpret their place and significance in the narrative quickly becomes wearying.

Did Bourgeois's theatrical impulses get the better of her as she became famous and entered her energetic late phase? I think so. Some commentators have suggested that the so-called "creation myth" - the family drama involving the English nanny - and Bourgeois's subsequent symbol-mongering amount to a sort of mask, an elaborate decoy.

There may be some truth to this. But however you interpret it, it has made responding to her work a real slog at times.

While it is doubtless refreshing amid the more sterile tendencies of modern art to see work with a bit of mess and emotion - in short, with a bit of a story - it remains the case that there are many kinds of storytelling. Melodrama is just one kind, and not always the most convincing.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.