Notes on Eccentric Abstraction: Bourgeois, Kusama, Hesse
Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Eva Hesse in Eccentric Abstraction
Exhibition context
The "Eccentric Abstraction" exhibition in New York presented an expressive alternative to Minimalism in sculpture, featuring artists like Bourgeois, Hesse, and Kusama. It marked a shift toward more bodily, autobiographical, and psychoanalytic forms.
Louise Bourgeois: biographical context and early formation
Born in Paris (1911), she assisted in her family's tapestry restoration business, developing an early fixation on repair and damage. Family tensions, particularly with her father, later influenced themes of domination and revenge. She studied art, then moved to New York in 1938 after marrying Robert Goldwater.
Bourgeois’s early art and the emergence of “part-objects”
Early Surrealist drawings like Femmes-Maisons (1945–47) depicted the female nude as a violated shelter. By the late 1940s, she made semiabstract wooden/bronze totems. The 1960s saw a shift to plaster, latex, and fabric sculptures of abstract body parts, which she termed “part-objects” in psychoanalytic terms.
Portrait (1963) and Le Regard (The Gaze): body-politics through Surrealist vocabulary
Portrait (1963): a brownish latex mass resembling an inverted, exposed body. Le Regard (The Gaze) (1966): a latex over plaster object described as an oeil-sexe (eye-sex), merging eye and genitalia. Dimensions: . It's interpreted as a feminist reconfiguring of the male gaze.
La Fillette (Little Girl) and feminist reappropriation of the phallus
La Fillette (Little Girl): a penile-shaped latex-over-plaster object. Although sometimes associated with Freud's ideas of penis substitutes, Bourgeois saw it as a feminist appropriation of the phallus, a 'personage' in its own right, paired with Le Regard in a feminist parody of the gaze.
The emergence of the feminist reading and the “lair”
Bourgeois engaged with feminism in the late 1960s. After her husband's death in 1973, she re-examined her traumatic past. She developed the “lair” concept—a protective, enclosed space that can also trap. The Destruction of the Father (1974) is her ultimate lair, a cave-like environment symbolizing patricidal aggression during a family meal presided over by a tyrannical father.
The Destruction of the Father as a pivotal work
This piece is a phantasmatic interior blending cave, body, and room, staging patricidal aggression from a female perspective and patriarchal anxiety through visceral consumption.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets, Accumulations, and Phallic Imagery
Kusama (born 1929) moved to New York in 1957. Her work involves multiplication and containment. She exhibited Infinity Nets (1959), large white web-like canvases. From 1961, her Accumulations covered household items with cotton batting, forming obsessive, repeated penile shapes. By 1963–1964, she created entire environments of “stuffed phalli,” such as Aggregation: One Thousand Boats (1964). The repetition parodies the phallus, blurring figure and ground, a function later taken by polka dots. Her environments became increasingly Pop and psychedelic, often with light and sound. Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (1965) used mirrors to create infinite phalli, polka dots, and her own body, staging an oscillation between self-exposure and self-erasure.
Eva Hesse: formal innovation, body, and inwardness
Eva Hesse (1936–1970) bridged Bourgeois's bodily imagery and Kusama's proliferation with formal innovation and intimate material processes. Her work, less overtly referential but inwardly troubled, drew on personal trauma (fleeing Nazis, mother's suicide). Critics debated whether her work emphasized essential female embodiment (Chave) or disrupted fixed sexual difference (Wagner). She used latex, fiberglass, and cheesecloth to create skin-like, fragile textures through repetition and binding, merging Minimalist grammar with Postminimalist strategies to express the body's inwardness.
Key works and ideas by Eva Hesse discussed in the lecture
Ingeminate (1965): two large tubular forms wrapped in dark material; it doubles and binds the phallus using balloons, surgical hose, enamel paint, cord, and papier-mache. Individual balloon dimensions: ; hose length . It explores sexuality and duplication. Contingent (1969) and Connection (1969) exemplify her use of materials to create forms both rigid and flexible, exploring gravity, balance, and the body's presence. Hesse's work confronts opposing attributes (hard/soft, geometry/organic), creating instability that is materially grounded and metaphorical.
The concept of eccentric abstraction and its continuities
Eccentric Abstraction describes late-1960s sculpture blending bodily imagery, sex/gender signaling, and a move from pure Minimalist form toward personal, psychoanalytic content. It foregrounds the body in sculpture, challenging conventional literalness and meaning, remaining relevant in feminist, psychoanalytic, and sculpture discussions.
Critical readings and interpretation threads
Anne C. Chave saw Hesse's forms as evoking female embodiment (trauma, womb). Anne Wagner countered that Hesse disrupted fixed sexual difference, presenting the body as unresolved drives. Mignon Nixon emphasized psycho-sexual associations in Hesse’s pieces, viewing doubling and binding as metaphors for gender ambiguity. The interplay of body and formal language (grid, cube, repetition) kept the body relevant in Minimalism and Postminimalism.
Contexts and connections to broader themes
These artists responded to and revised Minimalism, Pop, and Surrealism through a feminine lens, questioning objecthood, gaze, vulnerability, and power. Their works are analyzed via psychoanalytic and feminist frameworks, linking personal trauma to patriarchy, the gendered gaze, and representation politics. Each artist employed distinct strategies within the male-dominated 1960s/70s art world.
The practical and ethical implications
Their works raise questions about vulnerability, ethics of representation, and exhibiting private trauma publicly. They expanded sculpture's vocabulary, centered the body, and created a legacy influencing feminist and conceptual art.
Comparative synthesis and real-world relevance
Bourgeois, Kusama, and Hesse show how sculpture can integrate personal history, sexuality, and social critique. Their work encourages contemporary artists and historians to explore how vulnerability, trauma, and gendered experience are encoded in material and installation.
Glossary of key terms and concepts
Eccentric Abstraction: A 1960s–70s sculptural style mixing abstract shapes with personal, bodily, or psychological meanings.
Part-object: A psychoanalytic term for body parts becoming subjects of desire; used by Louise Bourgeois.
oeil-sexe: A Surrealist term combining eye and genital elements; used by Bourgeois in Le Regard.
Lair: Bourgeois’s concept of a safe, enclosed space that can also trap.
Accumulations: Kusama’s ongoing idea of household items covered with cotton padding, transformed into repeated forms.
Infinity Nets: Kusama’s large white paintings with repeating, web-like patterns.
Aggregation: One Thousand Boats: A Kusama installation featuring a phallic-covered rowboat with its images wallpapering rooms.
Ingeminate: A 1965 Eva Hesse work with two connected balloons and enclosed shapes, representing doubling of phallic forms with soft materials.
Contingent: An Eva Hesse artwork exploring material fragility and body metaphors within minimalist principles.
FURTHER READING (selected excerpts and references)
Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father. The Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997. MIT Press, 1998.
Lucy R. Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism. Dutton, 1971.
Mignon Nixon, "Positioning the Phallus." October, no. 92, Spring 2000.
Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), Eva Hesse. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
Anne M. Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Eva Hesse. University of California Press, 1997.
Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996.
Lynne Zelevansky et al., Love Forever—Yayoi Kusama, 1958–68. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998.
Notable formal and thematic links across the three artists
All three artists used sculpture to explore the body, desire, and fear, challenging distinctions between concept/material, object/subject, and viewer/participant. Each created works demanding active viewer engagement. Their critique of traditional gender roles and encoding of trauma into sculpture unites them under feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-Minimalist explorations in late 20th-century sculpture.