Louise Bourgeois

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(b Paris, 25 Dec 1911). American sculptor, painter and printmaker of French birth. Her parents ran a workshop in Paris restoring tapestries, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn. She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to studio arts. In 1938, after marrying Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, critic and curator, she went to New York, where she enrolled in the Art Students League and studied painting for two years with V?clav Vytlacil (b 1892). Bourgeois's work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum Print Exhibition in 1939. During World War II she worked with Joan Mir?, Andr? Masson and other European expatriates.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

New York artist Louise Bourgeois (born 1911) was one of the most celebrated sculptors in the period following World War II. Although the stylistic evolution of her work defies art historical categorization and her iconography is completely intimate and overtly sexual, Bourgeois' sculptures are exemplary of 20th-century artistic currents during the most controversial period of American art.

At the age of 82, Louise Bourgeois represented the United States in the prestigious 1993 Venice Biennale. Bourgeois' sculptures were on special exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C.; her prints were on exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and a selection of her drawings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although this may have been a hallmark year in Bourgeois' lengthy career, her relatively quiet emergence into American mainstream art began over fifty years earlier in New York City.

Bourgeois was born in Paris on December 25, 1911, and remained in France until 1938. She was the middle child of three born to Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. The family ran a tapestry gallery/workshop below their Paris apartment on the boulevard Saint Germain. Throughout her education, Bourgeois worked in the family business restoring tapestries, but her parent's avocation was not her own. In 1932 she earned a baccalauréat at Lycée Fénelon in Paris where her interest in geometry, developed during her school years, enabled her to pursue an education at the Sorbonne to study mathematics and philosophy. However, her love of geometry, coupled with an interest in the arts cultivated at the tapestry gallery, led Bourgeois to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a career in the arts.

In pursuit of a more liberal and less rigid artistic education, Bourgeois left the school. Between 1932 and 1938 she studied with such prominent artists and philosophers as Ferdnand Léger, Roger Bissiére, and Paul Colin. She attended various ateliers, including the Académie Julian, Académie Ranson, and the Académie de la Grande-Chaumiére. Her interest in the visual arts and the international spirit of early 20th-century Paris also led her to the Louvre where she worked as a docent and cultivated her knowledge of art history at the Ecole de Louvre.

In 1938 Bourgeois married art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City. Upon her arrival in New York, Bourgeois immersed herself in painting, printmaking, and drawing. She enrolled at the Art Students League and fostered friendships with members of the American Abstract Artists group who were advocates of Cubism, Biomorphic Abstraction, and Surrealism in America. Bourgeois' preoccupation with the intellectual conception of line, surface, and form (principles of Analytical Cubism) became the stylistic foundation for her works on paper and canvas. Within one year she was exhibiting her work in print exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Print Club, the Library of Congress, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In the 1940s Bourgeois began exhibiting her paintings in many Abstract Expressionist group shows, and in 1945 she was given her first solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York. During this decade, while her colleagues were turning toward pure abstraction, Bourgeois embraced aspects of Surrealism and Automatism exemplified in her Femme-Maison series (ca. 1946-1948), and she began to develop a very personal symbolic iconography based upon the events that shaped her life in France. It was also at this time that Bourgeois began to explore the three-dimensional qualities of her designs and all but abandoned painting for sculpture. In 1949 she made her sculpture debut at the Peridot Gallery.

Bourgeois almost immediately investigated the possibilities of wood. These sculpted totem-like forms, reminiscent of a shuttle used for weaving, became symbols for her family members and a signature shape associated with Bourgeois throughout her career in the 1950s and 1960s. Spiral Woman (1953, New York: Robert Miller Gallery) is a six-foot wooden abstraction of the movement of a woman through space. Blind Leading the Blind (ca. 1947-1949, New York: private collection), a totemic composition related to the Gospels according to Matthew 15, is associated with the blind confidence in people who influenced Bourgeois' life.

Bourgeois turned from the media of wood and plaster to latex, marble, and bronze in the 1960s and 1970s. She began to sculpt landscapes exemplified by Clamart (1968, New York: Kolin Collection), the burial place of Bourgeois' parents and grandparents, and Cumulus I (1969, Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne), a study of cloud formations. Both are studies of the calming and tranquil effects of the heavens and earth, and each reflects Bourgeois' love of repetitive conical shapes erupting through a thin layer of skin.

Concurrently, Bourgeois began to explore her sexual psyche through similar forms. Unlike her Femme Maison of ca. 1947 (Boston: Barbara Krakow Gallery), Femme Maison 81 (New York: private collection) is no longer a surreal exposé of a female whose head is replaced with her home. It is a series of phallic totems growing in various directions. Her bronze 1984 Spiral Woman (New York: Dannheisser Collection) is a legged phallic symbol wrapped in a thick boa-like coil. Fillette (1968, New York: private collection), an erect uncircumcised penis, and Fragile Goddess (ca. 1970, New York: private collection), a headless and limbless female shape with protruding breasts and belly, are perhaps the most sexually explicit works of the artist's mature years. They relate to the aggressiveness and helplessness of the masculine female.

In 1994 she displayed The Red Rooms at Peter Blum's in New York. The work consists of two bedrooms representing parent and child respectively. The rooms, drenched in red and rife with symbolic furnishings, typify her highly personal themes. The Red Rooms is intended to expose moods from her childhood. Her spider drawings, The Nest, symbolic of the well-nurtured family, were seen in that same year at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent.

Bourgeois taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island, as well as at Brooklyn College and the Pratt Institute. She was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982 and at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Múller in Otterlo, The Netherlands, in 1991. Although Bourgeois will forever be immortalized through a Mapplethorpe portrait of the artist with Fillette in her arms, her oeuvre will exemplify the variety of artistic expressions among 20th-century American sculptors.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive information on the artist can be found in the catalogues Louise Bourgeois (accompanying her retrospective in Otterlo, 1991, and New York, 1982), Rubenstein's American Women Sculptors (1990), and Watson-Jones' Contemporary American Women Sculptors (1986). A discussion between the sculptor Alain Kirili and Bourgeois about the artist's early years and the symbolic nature of her work ("The Passion for Sculpture") was published in Arts Magazine (March 1989) and is particularly enlightening. Bourgeois was also an accomplished art critic, and her articles "Freud's Toys, " Artforum (January 1990), and "Obsession (of Gaston Lachaise), " Artforum (April 1992) are both insightful and instructive. They reveal Bourgeois' evaluation of contemporary art in terms of sexual psychoanalysis.

Additional Sources

Bernadac, Marie-Laure, Louise Bourgeois, Flammarion, 1996.

Bourgeois, Louise, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations, University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive University of California, 1995.

Louise Bourgeois
Maman, by Louise Bourgeois, is a 30-foot (9.1 m)-tall spider. This copy of the bronze sculpture was photographed outside the National Gallery of Canada
Born	December 25, 1911 (1911-12-25) (age 97) Paris, France
Field	Sculpture, Painting
Training	École du Louvre, École des Beaux-Arts, worked as an assistant to Fernand Léger, Art Students League of New York

Louise Bourgeois (French pronunciation: [luiz buʁʒwa]; born December 25, 1911) is an artist and sculptor. Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman, from the last dozen years.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Work 2.1 Inspiration for future generations of artists 3 Documentary 4 Gallery 5 See also 6 References 7 Books 8 Further reading 9 Video 10 External links

Personal life

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris, France. Her parents repaired tapestries. At 12, she started helping them draw the missing segments of the tapestries. At 15 she studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. Her studies of geometry contributed to her early cubist drawings. Still searching, she began painting, studying at the École du Louvre and then the École des Beaux-Arts, and worked as an assistant to Fernand Léger. In 1938 she moved with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, to New York City to continue her studies at the Art Students League of New York, feeling that she would not have stayed an artist had she continued to live in Paris. ^[1]

She lives and works in New York City.

In 2009 at the age of 97, she and the Easton Foundation bought her neighbor William Ivey Long's townhouse in Manhattan for $4.75 million. ^[2]

Work

She is best known for her 'Cells', 'Spiders' and various drawings, books and sculptures. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them in symbolic terms with the main focus being "relationships" - considering an entity in relation to its surroundings. Louise Bourgeois finds inspiration for her works from her childhood: her adulterous father, who had an affair with her governess (who resided in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge it. She claims that she has been the "striking-image" of her father since birth. Bourgeois conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy, but with playfulness. In her sculpture, she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Some of her pieces consisted of erotic and sexual images, with a motif of "cumuls" (she named the round figures such because they reminded her of cumulus clouds). Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman, from the last dozen years. A similar sculpture was featured at an art exhibition in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Her earliest exhibition, in 1947, consisted of tunnel sculptures and wooden figures, including The Winged Figure (1948). Despite early success in that show, with one of the works being purchased for the Museum of Modern Art, Bourgeois was subsequently ignored by the art market during the fifties and sixties. It was in the seventies, after the deaths of her husband and father, that she became a successful artist.

In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. In 1999 she participated in the Melbourne International Biennial 1999. Also in 1999, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

“

Three large steel towers, about 30 feet (9.1 m) high, fill the east end of the Turbine Hall. Each tower supports a platform on which two chairs are surrounded by a series of large swivel mirrors. The mirrors with their reflective surfaces create a space for contemplation and reflection. Visitors are able to mount spiral staircases on the towers to experience the space of the platform and the Turbine Hall. Bourgeois imagines that the platforms will become the stage for significant conversations and human confrontations. Adjacent to the towers and straddling the bridge of the Turbine Hall is an 35 feet (11 m) high spider by Bourgeois, the largest she has made.[3]

”

The original installation was later dismantled. Many copies of the installation, cast in bronze, exist around the world.

All of Bourgeois' sculptures incorporate a sense of vulnerability and fragility. Her works are often viewed to have a sense of sexuality to them, which she believed is a large part of both vulnerability and fragility. ^[1]

Inspiration for future generations of artists

In October 2007, The Observer interviewed a number of British contemporary artists, Rachel Whiteread, Dorothy Cross, Stella Vine, Richard Wentworth and Jane and Louise Wilson, about how Louise Bourgeois's art inspired them, in an article called Kisses for Spiderwoman.^[4] Vine described Bourgeois as one of the "greatest ever artists" and said that "few female artists have been recognised as truly important". She said there was a "juxtaposition of sinister, controlling elements and full-on macho materials with a warm, nurturing and cocoon-like feminine side" that appears within Bourgeois' art. Vine also described Bourgeois as: ""incredible: she's known all these great men and outlived them all."^[4]

On 12th November 2007, leading British artists Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin and Stella Vine again, were all interviewed by Alan Yentob for BBC One's series Imagine in the documentary Spiderwoman about the life and art of Louise Bourgeois.^[5]

Documentary

Bourgeois' life, career, and creative process is examined in the 2008 documentary film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

Gallery

Maman, located outside the National Gallery of Canada.

See also

List of artworks by Louise Bourgeois

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Robert Ayers (July 28, 2006), Louise Bourgeois, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19186/louise-bourgeois/, retrieved 2008-04-23 
2. ^ ""Big Deal: Room for the Eight-Legged," New York Times". October 30, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/realestate/01deal2.html. 
3. ^ Special Exhibitions
4. ^ ^{a b} Fox, Killian and Toms, Katie. Kisses for Spiderwoman, Louise Bourgeois., The Observer, 14 October 2007. Retrieved 31 January 2009.
5. ^ "Imagine, Transmission Tuesday, 13th November 2007 Louise Bourgeois, Spiderwoman" BBC Online, 13 November 2007. Retrieved 10 December 2008

Books

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. pp. 46-49
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p.8; p.31; p.36; pp. 66-69
• Louise Bourgeois : La Sage Femme, 2007 [Exhibition catalog].

Further reading

• Falconer, M (2007-09-15). "Listen with ‘Mother’". Visual Arts (The Times). http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article2433343.ece. Retrieved 2007-09-28. 
• Huhn, Rosi. "Louise Bourgois", in: Inside the Visible, edited by Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press, 1996.
• Mignon Nixon, "The She-Fox". In: Women Artists at the Millennium. Edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher. October Books / MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 0-262-01226-x
• Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, October Books / MIT Press, 2005, ISBN 0-262-140896
• Wallpaper, October 2008[1]

Video

• Interview with Nancy Spector about Louise Bourgeois show at Guggenheim in New York , 2008 by ScribeMedia.Org

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louise Bourgeois

• Sculptor Louise Bourgeois: A year of events celebrating her life and work WSWS Arts Review
• 2007 exhibition at Tate Modern, London
• 2008 exhibition at Pompidou Centre, Paris
• Dossier : Louise Bourgeois, Centre Pompidou
• 2008 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
• Elaine Showalter on Louise Bourgeois
• Louise Bourgeois at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
• Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 2 (2003).

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