Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

"A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, [Louise] Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain."

"The stroke of genius in Marion Cajori (who died in 2006 while the film was still being edited) and Amei Wallach's documentary is filming Bourgeois's artworks in a way that conveys their imposing emotive presence," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. The film "gets at the heart of what makes Bourgeois a great artist (indeed, what makes anyone a great artist): her work reveals as much about her as our reactions to it reveal about us."

Updated through 6/27.

John Anderson looks back on the life of Marion Cajori, whose films include Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Chuck Close, and talks with her daughter about the many years devoted to this one: "Just as Louise has had the past with her all the time, my mother had cancer following her around, no health insurance, two kids—and I think, in a way, for both of them, art was a source of sanity. I think, for many years, making the film kept my mother alive."

Also in the Voice, Nick Pinkerton: "The filmmakers seem to have developed an unusual intimacy with their subject, and part of this film's pleasure is in the intergenerational frictions that come up in Bourgeois and Wallach's conversations, with the interviewer trying to coax her subject into mouthing explicitly feminist cant, and Bourgeois cannily demurring."

"Frequently roving around and taking awe at Bourgeois's massive artwork, the filmmakers may understand the artist as a woman and a living creature but they often treat her as if she herself were a museum piece," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

At Film Forum through July 8. On Friday, Louise Bourgeois, "a full-career retrospective," opens at the Guggenheim. Through September 28.

Update: "Although difficult to encapsulate," writes Lauren O'Neill-Butler for Artforum, "the best précis of Bourgeois's career is offered near the end of the film by Tate Modern curator Frances Morris, who notes, 'For me, the first encounters with Louise were really as a historic figure, a classic modern 20th-century artist. Subsequent encounters with her were as a contemporary artist.... She's the only figure in 20th-century art that I see in both these contexts.... As she's become physically older and, in a way, more ambitious, her work has become more universal.'... Never fully embraced by Dada, Surrealist, or Abstract Expressionist circles, she stopped showing her work in the early 50s, only to gain late-career success in the 80s, when 'Greenberg formalism was on the way out.'" That last quote, I believe, is Bourgeois's.

Update, 6/26: The filmmakers "depict the vulnerability and fortitude of the artist, qualities that are as much characteristics of her person as of her body of work," writes Nell Gluckman in the New York Sun.

Updates, 6/27: Holland Cotter in the NYT on the Guggenheim retrospective:

"There is one story and one story only that will prove worth your telling," says the poet. The trouble is, even the most intriguing story has its limits, its fixed set of characters and situations. And Ms Bourgeois's story - Robert Storr makes this point in the exhibition catalog - has been the sole lens through which her art is viewed, so faithfully and consistently that you would be very surprised to find any surprises in a retrospective.

But there are surprises, beginning with what the exhibition reveals about the shape of her long career, and specifically, its departure from the linear shape that "career" implies.

"Louise Bourgeois is neither linear nor narrative; it jumps around in ways that aren't always helpful, and assumes (or dismisses the importance of) some familiarity with Bourgeois' career history, her personal life, and her place in New York's artistic pantheon," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "But as a portrait of the artist and her work, it's endlessly striking, a catalog of visual accomplishments that speak for themselves."

Posted by dwhudson at June 25, 2008 12:46 AM