On a recent visit to New York’s Jewish Museum, I viewed every artwork and read each label in “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” (through Sept. 12) without learning whether the artist was born or identifies as Jewish. Given “Jewish” appears in the museum name, I continue to find this shocking.

Would the Air Force Museum remain mum on whether the subject of a massive exhibit ever flew a plane? Could the John F. Kennedy birthplace neglect to inform visitors that JFK was born?

Known for mammoth, arachnic sculptures, Bourgeois (1911-2010) was also not Sigmund Freud’s daughter—despite the exhibit title. The latter, incidentally, was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, but the Jewish Museum also neglects sharing his Jewishness with viewers.

To the extent the curators see a connection here it is that Bourgeois “perhaps more than any other artist of the 20th century … produced a body of work that consistently and profoundly engaged with psychoanalytic theory and practice,” which Freud established.

That “perhaps” shoulders an exceedingly-heavy load.

Paul Klee (1879-1940), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Joan Miró (1893-1983), and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) were several of many 20th century artists who engaged deeply with Freud’s writings. Dalí, who met and sketched Freud, called “Interpretation of Dreams” one of his life’s “capital discoveries.” I would like to see an exhibit of 20th century artists whom Freud did not inspire.

“Bourgeois considered the act of artmaking a form of psychoanalysis, believing that through it she had direct access to the unconscious,” the Jewish Museum notes. Perhaps that puts daylight between this artist and the many others who reacted in one way or another to psychoanalysis.

As I navigated the show in the museum’s second floor galleries, I allowed for the possibility I missed a hint about Bourgeois’ faith. Quite a bit of sleuthing prior to the show had turned up empty, so I asked a guard if the exhibit shared anywhere whether Bourgeois was Jewish. “Oh no,” he informed definitively. “It wouldn’t tell you that.”

That viewers do not learn whether the artist was Jewish in a Jewish Museum show is amplified by the sense one gets in the show of prying into an artist’s private business. A very large show emphasis is making visitors feel like they are eavesdropping on Bourgeois’ psychoanalysis sessions—treatment she underwent from 1952-1985.

Many of these transcriptions of her dreams and of her analysis sessions are shown publicly for the first time, the museum states. This all begs the question whether some would have been better kept private.

Given the date of this self portrait in the Jewish Museum show—1947—it would be informative to know whether the artist was Jewish/My photo

One treat in the show, which came as a surprise to me, was a self portrait, which is quite different from the spider sculptures. In the picture, Bourgeois devotes much more detail to the clothing and backdrop than the head, which is about as legible as would be the lion’s from the original “Wizard of Oz” at night.

Strictly speaking, Bourgeois has depicted her own head in the self portrait, but the painting is as much an erasure of herself as it is a revelation. Whether the year of its creation—1947—was uniquely significant to her remains unexplored. If she was Jewish, one can imagine creating such a work so soon after the Holocaust would be pregnant with meaning.

Reading Bourgeois’ writings on the exhibit walls is also baffling. I did not see any indication in the exhibit whether most of the framed papers were Bourgeois’, or whether some later person transcribed and printed them. (There are a few that are clearly originals.) That the texts contain references with “sic” suggests that some other hand is copying the artist’s writings.

And the texts themselves are opaque. Here is a passage from 1958:

Violence has neither beginning nor/ end, it is disorder and incoherence and uselessness it/ belongs to the irrational world of pure emotions—/ In geometry there cannot be violence because/ all the cases are considered—no surprises can be/ calm/ but in sculpture, there is change, inces/ santly, any chance is evidently a violence/ against the order that it changes. I do not like that—/ I want everything to remain as it was.

Others I read in the show did equally convincing impressions of John Ashbery poetry.

If the point of the exhibit is to make Bourgeois’ life and work even hazier than it likely was before for viewers, this show is very successful. But it is also really hard to get beyond the fact that the exhibit does not even share whether she was Jewish.

Rough Sketch