Louise Bourgeois French, 1911-2010

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist with a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010. She was born in Paris and raised by parents who owned a tapestry restoration business. Bourgeois was a gifted student and she also helped out in the workshop by drawing missing elements in the scenes depicted on the tapestries. During Bourgeois' childhood, her father had several affairs including one with her English tutor who lived in the family home. This acutely upsetting betrayal remained a painful memory for Bourgeois. In 1930 at the Sorbonne she studied mathematics and geometry. Her mother's death in 1932 inspired the young Bourgeois to abandon these studies and to turn to art. In 1938 in Paris she met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, and they married then moved to New York.

 

Early in her career Bourgeois concentrated on painting and printmaking, only turning to sculpture in the late 1940s. She became immersed in psychoanalysis during the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1964, after a long hiatus, Bourgeois exhibited strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures. These works contrasted sharply with her earlier totemic wooden pieces. The artist's fundamental vision alternated between figuration and abstraction whilst continually exploring a variety of themes including anger, fear, domesticity, the family, loneliness, sexuality, the body, death and the unconscious.

 

Bourgeois' idiosyncratic methods found few supporters in the years when formal issues dominated the art world. However by the 1970s and 1980s, the focus had shifted to the examination of various kinds of imagery and content. In 1982 Bourgeois, at 70 years old, finally took centre stage with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As a result the artist was filled with a new belief. Bourgeois forged ahead creating evocative figures often hanging from wires, eerie room-sized 'Cells', a range of fabric works fashioned from her old clothes and her iconic, monumental spiders. Day and night she constantly made drawings on paper and also returned to printmaking. Bourgeois considered art to be a therapeutic process even an exorcism. In 2010 Bourgeois died in New York at the age of 98.