Memory, Family, and the Body

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to childhood in her family’s tapestry workshop and to feelings generated by parental intimacy, betrayal, dependence, and loss. She did not illustrate autobiography directly; she converted it into unstable bodies and archetypal relations.

Breasts, limbs, phallic forms, houses, and coupled figures can appear nurturing and threatening at once. Ambivalence is the structure of the work rather than a problem to resolve.