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Lippard -2

with natural forces, to ward off evil, encourage good, and to deal with fear. Bourgeois' animism serves similar functions. Her references are frequently nostalgic. She traces her obsession with houses and rivers, and all they imply as symbols, to her childhood along the Bièvre [[strikethrough]] and Creuse [[/strikethrough]] River as the daughter of two self-employed tapestry workers with roots in Aubusson. [[strikethrough]] and Gobelins [[/strikethrough]] It would, however, be a mistake to see Bourgeois as the classically [[strikethrough]]female [[/strikethrough]] "feminine" artist, adrift in memory and intuition, for her first formal "revelation", and the origin of her love for sculpture, was solid geometry. Though from the age of fifteen she worked with her parents as a draughtsman restoring ancient tapestries, she majored in math at school, took her baccalaureate in philosophy, and studied calculus and solid geometry at the Sorbonne. Only in 1936, at the age of 25, did she begin to study art history and art--with Leger, among others. She arrived in New York in 1938-- French, newly married, appalled by the impersonality of a skyscraper city, already a loner and something of an eccentric.

A lasting preoccupation with "the relation of one person to his/her surroundings"1 was augmented by her spatial fascination with and alienation from New York. The small surrealizing paintings and stark engravings--graphic representations of sculptural forms--made in the 1940's, dealt with "uneasy spaces"2 a world where the embrace is smothering. Recurring themes were containment, the woman's body-house, the frustrated desire for escape (ladders going the wrong way, a balloon hovering desolately in a room, foiled by too small a door), houses with wings or [[strikethrough]] feathers, [[/strikethrough]] containing fires "against depression"; looming columns with circular eyes, a "coffin, for time that is gone." Anxiety is pervasive in these highly autobiographical works which reflect the artist's view of herself as a little girl--"trying to be good and absolutely disgusted with the