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10

Artforum 
March [[strikethrough]] 73 [[/strikethrough]] '75 

Louise  Bourgeois:From the Inside Out
Lucy R. Lippard

It is difficult to find a framework [[strikethrough]] as right as its [[?]] within which to [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] vivid enough to incorporate Louise Bourgeois' sculpture. Attempts to bring a coolly evolutionary or art historical order to her work, or to see it in the context of one art group or another, have proved more or less irrelevant. Any approach--non-objective, figurative, sexually explicit, awkward or chaotic; and any material--perishable latex and plaster, traditional marble and bronze, wood, cement, paint, wax, resin--can serve to define her own needs and emotions. Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker's psyche.

Each period of Bourgeois' work tends to correspond to the hidden rhythms of her life at the time. [[strikethrough]] They [[/strikethrough]] It ebbs and flows between anxiety, tenderness, fear, rage, and sometimes, a stoic calm. Obsessed with her content, she moves back and forth between techniques and styles, doing what she has to do to exorcise the images that haunt her. The resulting unevenness reflects primarily an internal erraticism, and only secondarily an external eclecticism. While her work has formal affinities with that of artists as diverse as Miró, Kiesler, Hesse, Arp, Hepworth, Giacometti, or the Salemmes, it so clearly has other origins that such comparisons are far less interesting than the violent clues to the artist's intentions which provide the aura for these forms. I am also reminded by this aim at animistic oeuvre, of various "primitive" artifacts, of their emotive qualities more [[strikethrough]] so [[/strikethrough]] than [[strikethrough]] by [[/strikethrough]] their formal influence (shared by the cubists whom Bourgeois knew in Paris, by her friends among the Surrealists and the burgeoning New York School in the 1940's and 1950's). Much tribal art is made to insure continued contact →