Sculpting the feminine

Most 94-year-olds just want to take it easy before time runs out. Not Louise Bourgeois, the nonagenarian New York artist, who still likes to stir things up. Her creepy spiders, sexually suggestive couplings and knife-wielding nudes, on view at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, are images not usually associated with the elderly. Bourgeois hardly seems fitting as a last name for this Paris-born provocateur.

One of few famous women in the macho art world, Miss Bourgeois is sculpture’s answer to feminist crusader Betty Friedan, who died a week ago, giving the Baltimore retrospective an unexpected timeliness. Like Mrs. Friedan’s groundbreaking book,” The Feminine Mystique,” the artist’s idiosyncratic, sexually charged pieces were among the first to challenge cultural norms from the perspective of her own experience.

“I have endeavored during my whole lifetime as a sculptor to turn woman from an object into an active subject,” Miss Bourgeois said in 1975.

Her feminist sensibility pervades “Louise Bourgeois: Femme.” The exhibit was co-created by the Walters, where most of the works are shown, and Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum, which also has mounted a small display.

This fragmented, uneven survey of older pieces, mostly culled from the artist’s own collection, concentrates on Miss Bourgeois’ decades-long preoccupation with the female body and psyche — how it is shaped, objectified and devalued. Some of the sculptures, symbolizing enforced domesticity and female submissiveness, seem like relics in light of social advancements since the early days of the women’s movement. Others, dealing with childhood traumas and family relationships, come off as psychobabble in 3D. Miss Bourgeois, apparently, hasn’t moved on.

Her most potent works are based on “primitive” and classical themes, and the Walters works hard to show how her contemporary sculptures relate to history.

That is, if you can find them. Instead of being grouped together in a separate exhibit space, the 39 works are dispersed throughout the permanent collection.

This treasure hunt of a show is a clever ploy to get visitors into the mustier parts of the museum. (A map and pink wall texts in the galleries help pinpoint the location of each piece.) It also succeeds in revealing Miss Bourgeois’ understanding of cultural traditions and her knowing use of them to critique the conventions established by male artists.

In the Walters’ gallery of Roman art, “Femme Maison,” a puddle of marble drapery topped by a buildinglike carving, seems inspired by the surrounding antique statuary. Yet the feeling of deflation and introspection expressed by this “housewife” is completely at odds with the heroic busts and torsos, almost as if foreshadowing the inevitable collapse of their ancient empire.

“St. Sebastienne,” displayed in a gallery of early Renaissance artworks, is a female fabric figure shot full of steel arrows. It’s an obvious feminist play on the painting of the martyred St. Sebastian hanging nearby. In a gallery of 17th-century paintings, a black marble nude with a knifelike head looks as threatening as the biblical Judith decapitating Holofernes in the dramatic scene hung above it.

Other Bourgeois pieces blend into cases full of old artifacts, as if they belonged to the same era. It’s easy to miss her gold spider brooch in a vitrine of art-nouveau jewelry by Rene Lalique and the glass beaded noose called “Chastity Belt” hung in the museum’s re-creation of a 15th-century lady’s chamber.

These juxtapositions create a visual tension and have you look at both the historical and contemporary artworks with fresh eyes. The comparative display, organized with the assistance of the artist’s collaborator, Jerry Gorovoy, also comes across as an ego trip, calculated to leave the impression that Miss Bourgeois’ works are as canonical as many of the artifacts around them. Certainly, her sculptures appear far more interesting in this context than they would be on their own, but few can be categorized as true masterpieces (pardon the term).

The French-born artist has been called the last surrealist, and her sculptures often exude a nightmarish feeling. Themes of loss, alienation and menace haunt her figures. She often depersonalizes them by leaving out specific physical details and subtracting or adding body parts. Many of her sculptures are based on memories from her remarkable life.

At age 15, Miss Bourgeois studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. She went on to train at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and work as an assistant to cubist Fernand Leger. In 1938, she moved with her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater, to New York, where she still lives.

Her parents restored tapestries, a skill often represented in her sculptures.

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