A: Is for the Timelessness in Art!

A leading artist for over 60 years leader is being honored in retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. This the first full Louise Bourgeois retrospective, held in a NY museum. A leader in modern art and, at 96, she is among the pre-eminent female artists working today. Bourgeois has been showing work since the 1940s and is best known for her massive spider sculptures. A pair now greets visitors upon entering the Guggenheim's rotunda. "Spider Couple" (2003) with gangly legs that can either entrap or embrace - and a pair of shiny aluminum spirals that resemble clouds or sausage stuffing, depending on the angle, hanging low near the entrance. These works can be intense, difficult, uncomfortable, and quite beautiful. It's as if your nightmares have come to life. Versions of this retrospective were first shown at the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In bringing the show to the Guggenheim, the museum's chief curator, Nancy Spector, said a certain amount of "rethinking" was involved to accommodate the "eccentricities" of the building, which is designed around a spiraling wide ramp with the centre of the structure left open.On each floor is an unobtrusive gallery entrance so the spiral seems nearly unbroken. The spiral starts with Bourgeois's earliest works in the 1940s and ends at the top with her most recent from 2008. It is a continuous path allowing viewers to see progression in an artist's work. The mediums change from the 1940s oil to 1960s wood sculpture to marble and metal, found objects, installation pieces, fabric - but the message stays consistent, somewhat redundant and extremely blatant. The 1940s oil paintings show a heavy surrealist influence. Continuing into the 1950s are her wood sculptures - stacks of painted wood arranged to resemble bodies or abstract architectural forms. The most recognized, 1951's "Femme Volage" is structurally the most interesting, though all bring to mind both Giacometti and Brancusi. Among the other wood forms are her African-influenced smaller sculptures, consisting mostly of oblong wood totems with pointed tops surrounding shorter, rounder pieces. "One and Others" (1955) exudes a frightening sense of claustrophobia, of the male surrounding the female with little way to escape. So begins the introduction to the themes that still pervade her work today - male and female, sexuality, violence, entrapment, anger, architecture and creation. Further up the spiral is "Cumul I" (1968), a beautiful, classical looking marble sculpture. From a distance, it resembles a rolling landscape and up close it appears to be phallic structures in various states of emergence from their cover. Staying with that theme - a few steps away - is the famous latex sculpture "Fillette" (1968), an obvious phallus hanging from its tip. But it also resembles feminine forms - artist Robert Mapplethorpe once photographed Bourgeois holding Fillette under her arm, a sly smile on her face. "The Destruction of the Father" (1974). leaves little to the imagination and it is a moonscape depiction under red light of a dismembered male figure on a table, surrounded on all sides by surging female rounded structures. Seen from above at a distance - a great benefit of the spiral - "Destruction" resembles a still from a horror film. The meaning couldn't be more clear. 1993's bronze "Arch of Hysteria," a beautiful headless male form arched backward, fingers almost touching heels. The sculpture shines and sways, casting a shadow on the white wall; a charcoal sketch of the work hanging above. The later years bring a change in medium with fabrics, clothing and pencil etching. The works themselves convey the same violence and sexuality as her earlier efforts, but the medium makes them into slightly softer representations. What is telling about these most recent works is not that they bring the art of Louise Bourgeois to a new level, but that they explain just how integral her life and themes are to her work.

Art know no time constraint and Louise Bourgeois makes that a living F.A.C.T.