Louise Bourgeois. No. 5 of 14 from the installation set À l’Infini. 2008. Soft ground etching, with selective wiping, watercolor, gouache, pencil, colored pencil, and watercolor wash additions, 40 × 60" (101.6 × 152.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased with funds provided by Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, and Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, and Richard S. Zeisler Bequest (by exchange). © 2017 The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY

“I like to be a glass house. There is no mask in my work.”

Louise Bourgeois

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois was raised by parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. A gifted student, she also helped out in the workshop by drawing missing elements in the scenes depicted on the tapestries. During this time, her father carried on an affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the English tutor who lived in the family house. This deeply troubling—and ultimately defining—betrayal remained a vivid memory for Bourgeois for the rest of her life. Later, she would study mathematics before eventually turning to art. She met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, in Paris and they married and moved to New York in 1938. The couple raised three sons.

Early on, Bourgeois focused on painting and printmaking, turning to sculpture only in the later 1940s. However, by the 1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in her production as she became immersed in psychoanalysis. Then, in 1964, for an exhibition after a long hiatus, Bourgeois presented strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures that contrasted dramatically with the totemic wood pieces she had exhibited earlier. But alternating between forms, materials, and scale, and veering between figuration and abstraction became a basic part of Bourgeois’s vision, even while she continually probed the same themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear.

Bourgeois’s idiosyncratic approach found few champions in the years when formal issues dominated art world thinking. But by the 1970s and 1980s, the focus had shifted to the examination of various kinds of imagery and content. In 1982, at 70 years old, Bourgeois finally took center stage with a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. After that, she was filled with new confidence and forged ahead, creating monumental spiders, eerie room-sized “Cells,” evocative figures often hanging from wires, and a range of fabric works fashioned from her old clothes. All the while she constantly made drawings on paper, day and night, and also returned to printmaking. Art was her tool for coping; it was an exorcism. As she put it, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.” Bourgeois died in New York in 2010, at the age of 98.

Note: Opening quote is from “‘I Don’t Need an Interview to Clarify My Thoughts’: An Interview with Louise Bourgeois.” Artspace, The Phaidon Folio, August 22, 2017. http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/louise-bourgeois-phaidon-folio.

Deborah Wye, Chief Curator Emerita, Prints and Illustrated Books, from the website Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, 2017

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] ; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has a lot in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Wikidata
Q159409
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Known primarily for her sculptures in wood, steel, stone, or cast rubber, she also produced prints and works on paper in her long career.
Nationalities
French, American
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Author, Manufacturer, Gallery Director, Pen Draftsman, Teacher, Engraver, Graphic Artist, Installation Artist, Painter, Pastelist, Pastellist, Performance Artist, Sculptor
Names
Louise Bourgeois, Louise Goldwater
Ulan
500057350
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

3040 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 245 pages
  • The Prints of Louise Bourgeois Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
  • Louise Bourgeois Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
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