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Louise Bourgeois, Femme pieu, c. 1970, wax, 6" x 3½ ' x 2½ ".

as they were by placing wet wood inside plaster; the plaster dried the wood, which then split its shell, using physical pressure as a simultaneous metaphor for anxiety and birth. As William Rubin has observed, "We are in the world of germination and eclosion - the robust sexuality of things under and upon the earth."5 Bourgeois is aware of the eroticism in her work, though she insists "I'm so inhibited at the reality level that the eroticism is completely unconscious. I find great pleasure and great ease in doing things that turn out to be erotic, but I do not plan them." For many years she did not openly acknowledge the sexual content of her art:

People talked about erotic aspects, about my obsessions, but they didn't discuss the phallic aspects. If they had, I would have ceased to do it. . . . Now I admit the imagery. I am not embarrassed about it. . . . When I was young, sex was talked of as a dangerous thing; sexuality was forbidden. . . . At the École des Beaux-Arts, we had a nude male model. One day he looked around and saw a woman student and suddenly he had an erection. I was shocked. Then I thought what a fantastic thing, to reveal your vulnerability, to be so publicly exposed! We are all vulnerable in some way, and we are all male-female.6

Bourgeois's phallic images are at times benign - fat, nestling, almost "motherly." Le Trani Episode is two long soft forms piled comfortably on top of each other; one has a nipple on the end, and both look like penises. She sees such mergings of "opposites" as a presexual perception of the dangerous father and protective mother, "the problem of survival, having to do with identification with one or the other; with merging and adopting the differences of the father." Fillette (Little Girl) - an ironically titled latex and plaster penis and testicles hanging from a hook - is so large "you can carry it around like a baby, have it as a doll." Nevertheless, the element of cruelty is unmistakable, as it is in several other phallic pieces, such as a plaster spiral which represents "strangling - twisting the neck of an animal. How do you define pain, suffering? Nobody has words to make other people understand what you've gone through. This is an inner image of this element."

Bourgeois's images of women and woman's experience are also ambivalent, juxtaposing a nurturing power of growth and emergence with the sharp threat of oppression. Her plaster self-portrait is armless, legless, centrally armored in heavy rib forms, but soft at top and bottom. The little stylized torsos in black-and-white marble are "rigid, becoming like masculine forms." From the early pole sculptures ("posts - you dig a hole and pound them in; they are defensive images"), came the Femme pieu (stake-woman). In one of several versions she is a grotesque parody of the Venus of Willendorf (thought by some to have been made by a woman as a fertility charm), lumbering forward, armless, her head replaced by a stakelike point, defending her exaggerated voluptuousness. Similarly, the knife-woman (Femme couteau) - a wrapped and folded marble blade with delicate pudenda exposed -

embodies the polarity of woman, the destructive and the seductive. . . . The woman turns into a blade. . . . A girl can be terrified of the world. She feels vulnerable because she can be wounded by the penis. So she tries to