How Women Artists like Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams Made Abstract Art Erotic

In the 1960s, stereotypically masculine art dominated the landscape. Modernist sculptors created hard, sturdy, monumental forms; while artists such as Allen Jones made overt, exaggerated sculptures of young women in submissive poses. Sexuality, when explored in art, was often obvious and from the male perspective. Enter a collection of women artists to challenge these cliches. They worked with unconventional materials to create a soft, fluid vision of the erotic body grounded in feeling, psychology, and playful abstraction.

“Abstract Erotic,” a new show at the Courtauld in London, celebrates this significant moment in 1960s sculpture. It brings together works by major women artists Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams, all of whom were in experimental moments in their practices. Now, they’ve all become household names. While they are not thought to have directly inspired one another, they each had an intriguing common thread in their practice at this time: representing erotic and bodily experiences through abstraction. Working with found and industrial materials as well as tactile substances such as clay and resin, these artists challenged the visual aesthetic of Modernism created by their mostly male contemporaries. Instead, they sought out radical and nonrepresentational ways to visually evoke the body, allowing the viewer’s imagination to run wild.

“They were working at a moment in the early 1960s when a lot of artists wanted to overturn the modernist precedents,” said the show’s curator, Jo Appin. “They wanted to find a new visual language of the body.” Bourgeois, Adams, and Hesse had studios around Lower Manhattan and visited art supply and hardware stores on Canal Street. They also reused found items such as steel cable in their work. All three were also included in the influential exhibition, “Eccentric Abstraction,” curated by legendary art critic Lucy Lippard. That show, which has long inspired Appin, brought together eight of Lippard’s artist friends, who were all “working with the urban fabric of the city,” said Appin. “It’s not minimalist; it’s not rigorous. It’s playful and messy.”

However, each of these sculptors arrived at this abstract approach to eroticism in a different way. Bourgeois, who was already a well-regarded modernist sculptor in the 1940s, had stopped working during the 1950s while undergoing psychoanalysis. She returned to her practice with force in the 1960s, creating visceral forms in latex and plaster while Adams and Hesse were also experimenting with unconventional materials. Bourgeois’s pieces evoke something between desire and disgust. For example, her brown latex and fabric sculpture, Le Regard (1963), looks like a large fecal pile or, confusingly, an inviting orifice, inspired by her interest in psychoanalysis and the subconscious links between attraction and repulsion. “My work is a repeated attempt at seducing somebody,” Bourgeois said, according to the exhibition notes.

Hesse’s found-material sculptures, on the other hand, were “not like anything anyone had ever seen before,” said Appin. In the mid-1960s, Hesse removed most of the color from her work, focusing on natural tones such as brown and tan which drew the viewer’s eye primarily to the shapes of her works. She blurred the lines between bodily insides and outsides, using nets and pendulous objects to call to mind both internal and sexual organs. In “Abstract Erotic,” a group of her untitled pieces from 1966 are included. These clusters of black and beige papier-caché (masking tape) spheres hang heavily in nets, evoking the droop of a scrotum or a collection of eggs huddled together.

Alice Adams, meanwhile, studied tapestry before she began working on sculptures that required weaving huge rolls of cable. At the Courtauld, her Big Aluminium 2 (1965) features a giant tube of chainlink fence that could be read as a large phallic shape, the inner workings of the gut, or a skin-like barrier. Adams was “interested in expansion and compression, and how can we not think of that in bodily terms?” said Appin.

Most of the works on show are small-scale. While they can’t be picked up and handled, they seem to yearn for touch. This size makes the sculptures more relatable. Rather than idealized, awe-inducing monuments, these works suggest sensation and bodily interaction. “It makes it much more intimate,” said Appin. Even some of the larger works, such as Adams’s Big Aluminium 2, are pliable and lightweight, despite their tough appearance.

For these artists, abstraction was an exciting new way to discuss erotic themes on their own terms. It allowed them to explore sexuality in a more subtle manner. Rather than being explicit, this visual language was coded, intriguing, and richly psychological. “I think it spoke to these women,” said Appin. “It’s more febrile. It allowed them to say and do things that they couldn’t normally, not necessarily because they weren’t allowed to, but because they might not even have a language for it.” Abstraction, for these women artists, avoided the simplicity of sex acts or bodily ideals, presenting a universal and open view of the erotic form. “It’s cerebral,” said Appin. “When you go into the show it’s quite cool. It’s not raucous ‘erotica.’”

There is also something inherently violent about the disembodied nature of these works, which show the human form and its sexuality as complex and at times conflicted. Hesse, for instance, evokes the discomfort of the body, while also embracing its sexuality. In Addendum (1967), a row of breast-like papier mâché forms each have trailing threads protruding from the centre. The threads appear to leak out of the breasts, evoking a bodily mess. These fleshy mounds are trapped, stuck to a wooden board on the wall, both humorous and horrific. Bourgeois’s Filette (Sweeter Version) (1968–99) is similarly disturbing, featuring a gold, phallic rubber sculpture pierced violently through the tip and hung from the ceiling. Both works play alluringly with pain and pleasure, comedy and gravitas.