- Artist
- Louise Bourgeois 1911–2010
- Part of
- Autobiographical Series
- Medium
- Drypoint and aquatint on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 183 × 290 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 1994
- Reference
- P77693
Summary
Woman with Suitcase is one in a portfolio of fourteen drypoint etchings collectively titled Autobiographical Series. It depicts a woman carrying a small suitcase as she walks from a building, in front of which is a half-drawn figure. Circles inside the building repeating the form of the head on the half-drawn figure suggest crowds of people coming and going from a port of embarkation. The young woman, whose long hair extends past her waist, is shown in profile, facing into an empty space. Bourgeois married the American art historian and teacher Robert Goldwater (1907-73) in September 1938 in Paris. He had to rush back to New York shortly afterwards for the start of the academic year and her journey across the Atlantic to join him was made alone. This image recreates Bourgeois's experience as a young woman, arriving alone in a new country. She looks into the blank page of her future confidently; her upright pose and statuesque body hinting at the active roles of motherhood and artist she was soon to be engaged in.
Bourgeois's work is based, more or less overtly, on memory. The recounting of her early years has become a fundamental part of her artistic expression, a narrative which, despite having been told many times, retains for the artist its emotional intensity. Through her work she is able to access and analyse hidden (but uncomfortable) feelings, resulting in cathartic release from them. She has said:
Some of us are so obsessed with the past that we die of it. It is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven and it is really the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can quite grasp. They might want to reconstruct something of the past to exorcise it. It is that the past for certain people has such a hold and such a beauty ... Everything I do was inspired by my early life.
(Bourgeois, p.133.)
Printmaking, like drawing, has been an important element in Bourgeois's artistic production. She first took it up in New York 1938 and experimented widely with techniques and effects, producing an important portfolio of etchings titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) in the 1940s. After a long break she took up printmaking again in 1973, the year her husband died. In the late 1980s Bourgeois began collaborating with workshops and publishers. She started to rework and reprint some of her old plates and to create new portfolios. Several of the images in the Autobiographical Series had already appeared in earlier forms. They range broadly in time and concept, encompassing both specific memories and more abstracted and ambiguous states of being. The portfolio was published in an edition of thirty-five plus ten artist's proofs by Peter Blum Edition, New York, and printed by Harlan & Weaver Intaglio, New York. See Tate P77682-92 and P77694-5 for the other images in the series.
Further reading:
Louise Bourgeois, Marie-Louise Bernadac, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, London 1998
Charlotta Kotick, Terrie Sultan, Christian Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993, The Brooklyn Museum, New York 1994
Deborah Wye, Carol Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994
Elizabeth Manchester
July 2001
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