The artist Louise Bourgeois was the Capricorn’s Capricorn – an embodiment of endurance, style, and wisdom. Born on Christmas Day in 1911, she was working, painting, sculpting, and writing in her journals right up until the day she passed, in 2010.
Every day, she said, you have to choose whether to abandon or accept your past. If you can’t do either, become an artist. Art was her “guarantee of sanity” but she revered the immutable laws of mathematics. Numbers are both magic and reassuring to Capricorns.
Although she was super prolific – the Museum of Modern Art alone has over 3000 of her works – Bourgeois did not become well-known until her 70s. An insomniac and a lover of silence, she described herself as a ‘long-distance runner’ – “I’m a lonely runner and that’s how I like it.” Not that she was a recluse – there were salons where she would give the young artists who could handle it an honest critique of their work and from the Eighties onward the increasing media and art world demands that came with success.
But she fought for the space she needed to do her best work and accomplish her super-Capricornian goal of always bettering her former work. One of her most famous works is a riff on Saturn, the ruling planet of Capricorn, in which she conflates him with her abusive father. Her absolutely most renowned work is called Maman or Mother, a tribute to – yes – her mother, who was a weaver. It is a giant spider sculpture with a mantra attached: I do – I undo – I redo.
She was actually a quadruple Capricorn, born with the Sun conjunct Mercury Retrograde, Lilith and Uranus in Capricorn. Her Ascendant and Moon were Aquarius, making Saturn her ruling planet, thus emphasizing her Capricorn nature even more. Her Saturn was in Taurus, opposite Venus and square her Ascendant.
It’s a difficult config, reflected in her early life experiences, but really I cannot think a better way to work with this than creating grand-scale sculptures and cathartic artworks. That they also made her such a success is fantastic ‘revenge.’
“Memory is a form of architecture,” she said.
” My eyes are granite. I see what is.” Vale Louise Bourgeois.
I love this quote x
Louise Bourgeois is amazing and I love her. was always very inspired by her work.
Go well! I knew you wouldn’t forget her, Mystic. I like to think that she’ll achieve even more recognition because of her absurdly long life as well. I think there’s something so elegant about being extremely old and still in control of all one’s everythings, not giving in to Chronos, just working alongside him. Beautiful.
This is officially freaky.
I dreamt yesterday morning of those light things following me through a house I was visiting. It reminded me of the creature in The Abyss but they were metal and looked EXACTKY like those sculptures. I touched them and they were hard and metallic and the eye kept following me WTF??? This keeps happening – dreaming of something and the next day bang I see it somewhere. I eventually ran into a back room but they could still come in.
Last week I dreamed of woods and two paths of trees that I could go down. Then in a very small clearing was a buddha head. In real life the following night I stayed in a motel and there on the wall of my bedroom was the EXACT same buddha head. 😮
I love her.
Is that a cock under her arm in the second pic?
Yes! It is a giant latex member called “Fillette” which means little girl in French. She grabbed it as a prop as she raced out the door for a photo shoot with Robert Mapplethorpe.
Genius. Much respect.
I really love those monster eye light things.
And she has exactly what under her arm that makes her grin?
‘You get out of life what you put in’???
Of course i love the fact her accolades didn’t come around til her 70’s.
That’s inspirational for sure. Isn’t that a Cap tendency, success in later
age?
that is indeed a wicked smile on her face isn’t it pegs! I saw one of her pieces in a gallery a while ago. v, uh, organic.
I just wrote my own little Louise blog, fascinating lady for sure. She looks like such a classic Cap to me, those eyes. Smiling but hard as nails!
Ah perspective. And what a woman!