Like the young runaway Dorothy Gale from Kansas, Bourgeois has been on a journey to alleviate a core experience of abandonment.īourgeois revisited the theme of running away from home in the drawing Home for Runaway Girls 1994. Louise Bourgeois’s longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, compares Bourgeois from this period with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz 1939: That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she’s hiding. She does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide.
Fallen Woman (Femme Maison) 1946-7 depicts a female figure with her head and torso covered in a house. Early paintings in New York such as Runaway Girl c.1938 depict Bourgeois leaving behind her childhood home. This move away from everything that was familiar affected her greatly. In 1938, just before the breakout of the Second World War, Louise Bourgeois left Paris for New York with her new husband Robert Goldwater.
Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation
