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Posts tagged ‘Louise Bourgeois’
October 27, 2015  |  Artists, Collection & Exhibitions
A Major Relaunch of MoMA’s Louise Bourgeois Prints Website

In 2012, MoMA launched the online catalogue, Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books (moma.org/bourgeoisprints) to document the full range of Bourgeois’s printmaking. At that time, the catalogue included some 400 works. The number has now grown to nearly 3,000, with an ultimate goal of approximately 4,000 items. The site is designed for the general art pubic as well as for specialists.

March 1, 2013  |  Collection & Exhibitions
The Making of Louise Bourgeois’s The Fragile
Louise Bourgeois. The Fragile. 2007. Series of 36 compositions: 29 digital prints and 7 screenprints, 30 with dye additions. Sheet (each approx.): 11 1/2 x 9 1/2" (29.2 x 24.1 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust. Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Photo:

Louise Bourgeois. The Fragile. 2007. Series of 36 compositions: 29 digital prints and 7 screenprints, 30 with dye additions, sheet (each approx.): 11 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (29.2 x 24.1 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust

Don’t miss Louise Bourgeois’s The Fragile, on view through March 8 on MoMA’s second-floor landing, outside the entrance to the Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries. The Fragile is included in the first 400 works on the Museum’s recently launched online catalogue raisonné, Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books.

Louise Bourgeois: A Flashback of Something that Never Existed
Louise Bourgeois. Ode à l’oubli. 2002. Fabric illustrated book with 35 compositions: 32 fabric collages, 2 with ink additions, and 3 lithographs (including cover), page (each approx.): 11 3/4 x 13” (29.8 x 33 cm); overall: 11 x 12 3/16 x 1 ¾” (28 x 31 x 4.5cm).  © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust

Louise Bourgeois. Ode à l’oubli. 2002. Fabric illustrated book with 35 compositions: 32 fabric collages, 2 with ink additions, and 3 lithographs (including cover), page (each approx.): 11 3/4 x 13” (29.8 x 33 cm); overall: 11 x 12 3/16 x 1 ¾” (28 x 31 x 4.5cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust

The first installment of MoMA’s new online project Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books includes Bourgeois’s fabric book Ode à l’oubli. In 2002, at the beginning of her 90th decade, Bourgeois constructed the book’s linen binding and pages out of 60-year-old, monogrammed hand towels from her 1938 wedding.

Louise Bourgeois: Spider Bytes
A finished diagram on the site with notes describing how these works are instructed to appear

A finished diagram on the site with notes about underlying data

MoMA’s recently launched website, Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, seems to effortlessly reveal Bourgeois’s creative process. You might not suspect that a highly organized sea of intricate data lives behind that elegant design.

January 9, 2013  |  Artists, Collection & Exhibitions
MoMA Launches Louise Bourgeois Website
Spider theme page on MoMA.org/bourgeoisprints

Spider theme page on MoMA.org/bourgeoisprints

Untitled, plate 8, from the illustrated book, Ode à ma mère, 1995. Drypoint. Plate: 9 3/8 x 7 7/16” (23.8 x 18.9 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Untitled, plate 8, from the illustrated book, Ode à ma mère. 1995. Drypoint. Plate: 9 3/8 x 7 7/16” (23.8 x 18.9 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust

The Museum of Modern Art has launched Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, a major website documenting Bourgeois’s extensive work in the printmaking medium. This site offers a range of innovative, interactive approaches to the artist’s work, including the ability to examine her creative process, and to place her prints and illustrated books within the broader context of her sculpture and drawings. When discussing the various mediums, Bourgeois said: “There is no rivalry…they say the same things in different ways.” All of these works explore her fundamental themes of loneliness, anxiety, fear, jealousy, anger, and pain.

In 1990, Bourgeois decided to donate a full archive of her printed work to MoMA. This includes all completed compositions, as well as the many states and variations leading up to them. Numbering some 3,500 sheets, this unique collection makes it possible to reconstruct the artist’s step-by-step working methods. The website presents, diagrammatically, all the stages of Bourgeois’s evolving compositions and reveals the myriad ways in which she altered shapes, added tiny scratched lines, or experimented with vivid color, all in pursuit of a final vision. In addition, individual works can be examined at close range through a “Zoom” feature—particularly useful for studying prints—or compared and contrasted with a pioneering “Compare Works” mode.

 

Spider Woman, 2004. Drypoint on fabric. Sheet: 13 1/8 x 13 ¾” (33.3 x 34.9 cm). ©2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Spider Woman. 2004. Drypoint on fabric, sheet: 13 1/8 x 13 ¾” (33.3 x 34.9 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust

The Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books website is the work of an integrated team of contributors, including MoMA’s curatorial, digital media, and collection and exhibition technologies staffs, as well as independent web designers and programmers and the staff of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. My own involvement with Bourgeois began when we met in 1976. I have been a committed scholar of her work ever since, and a friend until her death in 2010. The launch of what will be the definitive scholarly resource on Bourgeois’s prints—aimed also at the general art public—is a source of great pride and a sense of accomplishment for me, as well as for the entire Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA.

Please visit MoMA.org/bourgeoisprints to learn more about Louise Bourgeois’s prints and illustrated books, and her creative process.