The God That Failed: Louise Bourgeois, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko

An intriguing exhibition situates Bourgeois’ characterful early sculptures alongside the two incipient abstract expressionists

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse
9 June – 16 September 2023

by JOE LLOYD

In 1945, Louise Bourgeois painted herself as a plant. An untitled oil painting shows a woman composed of neatly rounded forms: a conical lower half, a teardrop-shaped torso and a flattened orb for a head, with a sprout of hair on top. This French topiary-person does not look particularly happy. At about the same time, Bourgeois started painting women fused with houses, each with a shock of hair resembling a flower blowing in the wind. Much later, she would make reddish-pink gouaches of flowers, their heads clumpy and clotted, sometimes resembling disembowelled internal organs. The self-portrait shows her identification with plants was there from the start.

The God That Failed, an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s near-lakeside Bahnhofstrasse branch in Zurich, captures Bourgeois at a pivotal point in her career. It also provides a rare chance to see her juxtaposed with others, here the abstract expressionist giants Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Bourgeois often interacted with both these men, and she joined the American Abstract Artists Group in 1954, at the same time as Newman. Yet, today, she is often exhibited alone. Although she lived in New York from 1938, was married to the scholar and curator Robert Goldwater from then until his death in 1973, and taught, hosted and otherwise interacted with a bevy of the city’s creators during its extended artistic golden age, Bourgeois is often cast as an artist in isolation. Historically, there are the obvious chauvinistic reasons for this. More innocently, there might be confusion as to where exactly to place her in an era of movements and clusters.

The God That Failed is titled after a 1949 essay collection in which celebrated leftist writers – André Gide, Arthur Koestler and Stephen Spender among them – discussed their disillusionment with communism in light of the Soviet Union’s terror. Curator Philip Larratt-Smith has widened the phrase to refer to the postwar age of iconoclasm, where the horrors of conflict opened up new ways of thinking, and to a general “crisis in the concept of authority”. It is a fascinating moment and prompts many questions. If the postwar artists sought to question authority, what did they seek to replace it with?

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1953. Bronze, 150.5 x 21.6 x 21.6 cm (59 1/4 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in). © The Easton Foundation / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Christopher Burke.

A collection of Bourgeois’ Personages occupy the exhibition’s core. These early sculptures, made long before the figurative forms for which she would eventually become celebrated, are totem-like structures. They take some cues from the surrealist sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, compounding forms from life into bizarre hybrids. But they also share something with the Swiss sculptor’s postwar thin people, emaciated by history; Bourgeois would later say the Personages represent “the superhuman effort of standing upright”. Although abstract in essence, they have an anthropomorphic aspect. They have personalities. Bourgeois initially carved many from wood using a razor blade, with the intention of casting them into bronze. The balsawood originals remained with her for much of her life.

The God that Failed: Louise Bourgeois, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko,installation view, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse, 2023. © The Easton Foundation / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich.

At Hauser & Wirth, the first room contains a tangle of these bronze versions, arranged as they were in Bourgeois’ early gallery exhibitions. They are arranged so that you have to carefully step around them. Most come up to eye-level. Some are placed together in clusters, as if conversing in the street, though whether they are friendly with each other is left to the imagination. Bourgeois would combine them into protective groups, while asserting that each was an individual being. Formally, they all share a verticality. But the individual components that make them up are all quite different. They summon up a huge range of associations, from the spectral to the everyday. Persistent Antagonism (1946-48) is a bronze and steel spear. Quarantania III (1949) is a robed figure lurking in the shadows. It could be a shape from Yves Tanguy. One Untitled (1947-49) piece looks like a floating ghost with a big blue eye, while Woman with Packages (1949) has just returned from shopping.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1954. Painted bronze and stainless steel, 141 x 55.2 x 30.5 cm (55 1/2 x 21 3/4 x 12 in). © The Easton Foundation / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Christopher Burke.

The Personages seem very different from Bourgeois’ later work, but they do deal with some of the same imagery. Bourgeois’ parents ran a tapestry workshop, and weaving would inform the artist’s output all the way to her late spider sculpture Maman (1999); here, some of the Personages resemble weaving shuttles. Elements of the floral remain from Bourgeois’ early painting. Although the Personages here stand on plinths, Bourgeois originally wanted them to sprout from the ground, plant-like. Fôret (Night Garden) (1953) sees bush-like units of various heights huddle together as if for warmth. Spring (1948-49) has an unmistakably flower-esque appearance. Other works are undeniably phallic, unsurprisingly for an artist who once opined that erect penises belong in museums, and who was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe holding an enormous sculptural schlong. Untitled (1953), an unpainted bronze totem made of individual units stacked on top of each other, peaks in a rounded cone, with an aperture like the window of a clarinet. Another Untitled stack (1954), with irregular bronze units painted in a virginal pale blue, feels almost skeletal, as if the artist has picked up fragments of bone from the desert and stacked them up.

Barnett Newman, Genetic Moment, 1947. Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 71 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection. Gift of Annalee Newman, New York. © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Cantz Medienmanagement, Ostfildern.

Bourgeois is the dominant voice here. A handful of works by Newman and Rothko feel like appendages to her sculptures. But it is interesting to see a 1945 oil painting by Rothko that seems to belong to the same post-surrealist dreamscape as Bourgeois’ early drawings. Newman’s Genetic Moment (1947), meanwhile, has two tree-trunk-like forms rising before a celestial object, paralleling both the verticality and biomorphism of the Personages. As both men moved towards their seminal colour field paintings, their paths further diverged from Bourgeois’, for all the verticality of Newman’s zips. Newman and Rothko sought to simplify, while Bourgeois’ forms proliferated. The painters moved towards spirituality, unsheathed from worldly concerns, while Bourgeois’ work unearthed trauma, domesticity, families and the subconscious mind. Their tools became wildly different, but the shared desire to create a new art on the bones of collapsed authority remained.

Mark Rothko, Fantasy (Untitled), 1945. Oil on canvas, 135.3 x 99.1 x 2.1 cm (53 1/4 x 39 x 7/8 in). © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / 2023, ProLitteris, Zürich. Private Collection, New York. Photo: Jon Etter.