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.
Introduction by Deborah Wye, Chief Curator Emerita, Prints and Illustrated Books, from the website Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, 2017
- Introduction
- Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] (listen); 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 much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
- Wikidata
- Q159409
- 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, Engraver, Painter, Sculptor
- Name
- Louise Bourgeois
- Ulan
- 500057350
Exhibitions
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Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury
Through Feb 6
MoMA
Last chance -
401: Out of War
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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503: Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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400: New Monuments
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape
Oct 21, 2019–Oct 4, 2020
MoMA
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Louise Bourgeois has
76 exhibitionsonline.
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Louise Bourgeois St. Germain 1938
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Pierre 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois Dream 1939
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Louise Bourgeois The Liseuse c. 1939
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Louise Bourgeois The Farm c. 1940
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Louise Bourgeois The Farm c. 1940
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Louise Bourgeois Easton c. 1941
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Louise Bourgeois Easton c. 1941
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Louise Bourgeois Easton c. 1941
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Louise Bourgeois Easton c. 1941
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Louise Bourgeois Summer 1941-1942
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Louise Bourgeois The Symbols 1942
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Louise Bourgeois The Symbols 1942
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Louise Bourgeois Summer 1941-1942
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Louise Bourgeois Summer 1941-1942
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Louise Bourgeois The Symbols 1942
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Louise Bourgeois Pinus Sylvestris 1938-1943
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Louise Bourgeois Untitled c. 1943
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Louise Bourgeois Untitled 1943
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Louise Bourgeois Morning 1944
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Louise Bourgeois Morning 1944
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Louise Bourgeois Morning 1944
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Louise Bourgeois Composition 1940–1944
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Louise Bourgeois Man Reading 1940-1944
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Louise Bourgeois During the War: Shortage of Food in Easton 1942-1944
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Louise Bourgeois Youth 1941-1944
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Louise Bourgeois Youth 1941-1944
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Louise Bourgeois Laurel Easton 1944
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