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PARTISAN REVIEW
there is something satisfyingly individual about Bourgeois's
combination of process and primitivism.
Bourgeois's work of the 1950s sharply criticized the cloying,
virtuoso marbles she exhibited at Robert Miller, pristine geomet–
ric shapes trimmed with mottoes and questions and horrible little
arms, legs, and hands. The effect was somewhere between a
mass of dismembered china dolls and the nastier kind of
Victorian polychrome sculpture . The marbles were beautifully
made, sentimental and repellent. Bourgeois may suffer from the
same inability to rise above unlimited possibilities as her late col–
league , Louise Nevelson. When Nevelson constructed with
worn, worked-over fragments, each with some of its own history
visible despite the new context and the unifying paint, she made
her best sculpture. Once she had the means to order a gross of
best quality doorknobs and install them in sleek, custom-made
containers, her work often lost a good deal of its edge. Bourgeois,
too , seems best when she is improvising, without quite so much
technique and luxurious material at her disposal.
Among the younger generation, the British sculptor
Richard Deacon is being paid a great deal of attention. Last year,
the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, organized an exhibi–
tion of sculptures from 1985 on that has since travelled to the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto. A slightly larger exhibition of works from
approximately the same period was seen in Paris this spring at
the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. Among other acco–
lades, he recently received a commission for an enormous piece
in Toronto. Deacon ' s work is arresting largely because of its un–
expected combinations of materials or, more accurately, because
of the way he plays forms not usually associated with sculpture–
things that drape, wrinkle or enclose the way a sleeve or trouser
leg encloses-against tense and rigid constructions. In Deacon's
most successful work of this type, there 's a sense of compression
and contained energy in the "stiff' portions that make the un–
structured sections even more startling. Since he relies heavily
on symmetry and systems to generate the rigid structures, the
informal and soft elements become even more eloquent. But,
particularly in Deacon's more recent work, process dominates to
the point where sculpture as a whole has difficulty transcending
the anecdotal nature of its making. Things that in earlier work
