Louise Bourgeois life and biography

Louise Bourgeois, born December 25, 1911 in Paris, France - died May 31, 2010, in Manhattan, New York was an American artist.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama. All my work of the last fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood.

A study of Louise Bourgeois' work from the late thirties to the present indicates that style and the evolution thereof are not fundamental to her character as an artist. Rather, it reveals the struggle of an individual actively attempting to define herself through her art. Bourgeois looks to herself for inspiration; consequently her work is personal and deeply autobiographical in content. Art functions for her as a psychological outlet, for making art is the process of giving tangible form to, and thus exorcising, the gripping, subconscious states of being that fill one with anxiety. Bourgeois' greatest achievement has been her ability to capture--and animate--the depth of the human psyche within a wide range of inventive and meaningful images.

Most of her prominent themes can be traced back to her years in France when a series of unresolved psychological conflicts governed her imagination. Her art belies the tension of her family life as created by the opposition of a clear-thinking, calm, and nurturing mother, and a powerful, volatile, and oppressive father. The polarity exacted anxiety, pain and anger, emotions that became the sources of Bourgeois's art. The psychological trauma of the war years, during which time her father was wounded, also had an impact on her work. After the war an English tutor caused the Bourgeois family additional problems because of her eventual liaison with Louise's father. The complications inherent in that triangle, the betrayals and primordial jealousies, seem to constitute a convincing origin for the implicit violence in a significant part of her oeuvre.

Bourgeois' career began to take form in the mid-1940s after studying at several schools in France, including the Academie Ransom, the Academie Julian, the Academie de la Grande-Chaumiere, and the École des Beaux-Arts, from 1934 to 1938. Stylistically, by the end of 1944 a grid scheme began to dominate the compositions of her paintings. She has related her use of this surface structure to her early family connections with tapestries and the delineation of their weave. During this period she developed an interest in balancing the formal issues of abstraction with the depiction of symbolic subject matter, a concern which she shared with the Abstract Expressionist tradition. As the decade progressed, Bourgeois's painting began to evolve toward a more personal, quasi-figurative imagery, with an underlying spirit of Surrealism. Her work moved toward the exploration of the reality of the subconscious. In effect, Surrealism encouraged her to tap the complex texture of her personal life as a source for her art.

The "Femme-Maison" paintings of 1947, portrayals of women with houses perched on their bodies in place of heads, are among her most powerful images. They are also symbols, moving in thematic directions that preoccupy the rest of her career. In them, a woman's sign of identity, her face, has been replaced by a house, implying that domesticity becomes the very definition of these women, since they have no other means by which to speak. Interestingly, the feminist dimension of her early imagery was not recognised until 30 years later.

In 1949 Bourgeois abandoned painting as a medium and began to explore the possibilities of sculpture, with the greater level of substantiality and physical impact afforded by its three-dimensional nature. By 1950 she had made over thirty sculptures and had achieved a surprising breadth of emotion through an increasingly formal sophistication. Her 1953 piece "Foret" embodied a new sculptural concept that would characterize her formal and thematic development of wood sculpture in the fifties. In this piece Bourgeois crowded a large assemblage of unusual elements together on a single base, suggesting a primordial group of plants. Due to the group's placement on the floor, it seems to be growing, as if sprouting seeds or pods. Furthering the theme of growth, Bourgeois exhibited One and Others in 1955. With its colourful, separate spools, this piece appears as a garden or bouquet. Yet viewed from certain angles, it takes on the form of a single flower whose blooming petals crate an organic symbol of health and burgeoning fecundity. The title, however, brings the sculpture back to the human world, suggesting individuals of various shapes and sizes huddling in mutual support and interdependence. This technique of clustering and crowding elements on a base is one that Bourgeois has employed persistently as a visual counterpart or symbol for the interactions of groups.

After 1953, Bourgeois participated in no solo shows until 1964 in New York. The highly politicized atmosphere of the 60s may have contributed to the transition of her formal development, as she was actively involved with certain issues. Her work was still an investigation of psychological and symbolic meaning. Yet the entire decade represented a time of wide experimentation with plaster, cement, rubber, latex, plastics, marble, and bronze. She toyed with twisted arrangements, labyrinthine formations, and amorphous masses of plaster or cement. With these eccentric pieces she tried to animate such psychological states as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She revived her favourite themes of withdrawal, hiding, protection, sheltering and nurturing. "Lairs," cavernous plaster structures resembling cocoons, illustrate these themes. The 1967 "Landscape" series expanded the format of "Lair," yet they bear the suggestions of human contours which are the beginnings of the sexual works that follow.

During the 60s and 70s, when feminism was gathering strength, sexuality finally emerged explicitly in her work. Her previous definition of woman--that of being helpless, expendable, and utterly without identity beyond the domestic realm--gradually gave way to a new conception tending toward a greater aggressiveness, sophistication, and elegance.

Her work in the 70s seemed to fill a distinct aesthetic need for personal content and meaning well beyond her earlier achievements. "The Destruction of the Father," 1974, a continuation of her earlier preoccupation with the hidden recesses of the plaster "Lairs," was the loudest personal statement of her career. The reincarnation of a perverse childhood fantasy in which the members of her family dismembered and devoured their self-important, domineering father, the piece consists of a cluster of bulbous, feminine latex forms that hang menacingly over a group of phallic shapes which rest on a table-like structure. The overtly psychological and sexual content of Bourgeois' work from this period on attests not only to the artist's resolute faithfulness to the intimate emotional sources of her work, but is all the more remarkable given the prevailing aesthetics of the Minimalist and Conceptual art of the time, which emphasized instead detachment, intellect and reserve.

In the last decade and a half, Bourgeois has produced some of her most powerful and ambitious work. The return to more personal and expressive modes of artistic production in the eighties and the thematics of the body in nineties art has meant increased recognition for Bourgeois's long career. She has continued to produce sculptures in materials as diverse as plaster, wood, latex, bronze, marble, and found objects, creating visceral biomorphs or startlingly realistic marble renderings of discrete human body parts that are at once sensual and foreboding. Flesh-like polyps of highly polished marble emerge from the roughly hewn base of Untitled (with Growth) from 1989, suggesting the fecund origins of both nature and sculpture. On a larger scale, Needle (Fuseau) from 1992 alludes to Bourgeois's family trade of tapestry restoration and hints at a reconciliation of male-female dichotomies. As an instrument used for mending, the shape of the needle suggests both a masculine piercing and, with its eye to hold thread, a feminine receptivity. Here a spool of raw, soft flax, placed on a mirror, rises up from the floor to thread a thinly arched steel needle which is flanked by testicle-like wooden spheres.

Increasingly, Bourgeois has created large and striking installations which amplify existential themes of privacy, dislocation, loneliness, and fear. The Cells series from 1989-93 consists of six rooms made from welded steel window frames and wooden doors. Placed in each cell is an enigmatic tableaux. In Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), round mirrors and looking glasses reflect back both the viewer and the cell's steel structure, creating complex interpenetrations of gaze and reflection, distortion and refraction. In another, glass spheres placed on chairs surround a pair of exquisitely rendered marble hands lying clutched together in pain or consternation on a table. In Cell (Choisy), an intricate marble replica of Bourgeois's childhood home sits below a suspended steel guillotine which acts as a sort of menacing gate. For Bourgeois the Cells title refers to both organic units of growth and self-contained, autonomous realities, all containing objects of memory. With their allusions to fragility, disease, and death, they extend the psychological themes of Bourgeois's oeuvre to the social realm.

Bourgeois's body of work is monumental in its range of materials and visions and in the depth of its commitment to revealing intimate, visceral conditions of self. Her endless resourcefulness and energy, her wit, her profound sense of inner strength, and her pioneering explorations of the body, of taboo subjects, and of installation have made her work germane to other women artists and to many younger artists working today.

Louise Bourgeois has remained artistically productive during the past decade. As always, her work is diverse in both style and media, and resists easy categorization; if anything, in recent years she has expanded her range of both imagery and materials. She has expanded upon the Cells series, large multimedia constructions of psychologically resonant roomlike spaces, "the locus of memory," as they were aptly called in the 1994 catalogue that accompanied a major retrospective of her work. Recently, as in "Cell XVI" (2001), Bourgeois has added discarded clothing to the assemblage, consistent with her use of patched material in other new work as in "Why have you run so far away" (1999).

The spider is a major motif that was present in her early works, particularly her drawings, but greatly expanded in her later ones, as in her commission for the inauguration of the Tate Gallery for Modern Art in 2000. "Maman" (1999) is a thirty-five foot black spider that filled the Tate's central turbine hall. Bourgeois has explained that her mother was "(as) clever, patient, and neat as a spider; she could also defend herself." In "Nest" a maternal figure hunkers down over several smaller spiders. Psychologically ambiguous, these spider figures are both nurturant and threatening, presenting a complex construction of the maternal.

During the last decade Bourgeois has been the subject of numerous traveling and retrospective exhibitions, including representation in the XXIII Sao Paolo exposition. In these shows, and in several publications, she has paired drawings and prints with excerpts from her diaries, expanding upon the autobiographical nature of her explorations into the human psyche. Bourgeois's themes remain rich and large: memory, sexuality, childhood, home.

Bourgeois died on May 31, 2010, in Manhattan, New York, of a heart attack. She was 98.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Nationality: American. Born: Paris, France, 25 December 1911. Education: Lycée Fenelon, Paris, 1932; Sorbonne, Paris, 1932-35; Ecole de Louvre, Paris, 1936-37; Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1936-38; Atelier Bissière, Paris, 1936-37; Académie Julian, Paris, 1938; Atelier Fernand Léger, Paris, 1938; also studied with Marcel Duchamp in New York. Family: Married Robert Goldwater in 1938; children: Michel, Jean-Louis and Alain. Career: Independent artist, New York, since 1938. Taught at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, 1937-38; Great Neck Public Schools, New York, 1960; Brooklyn College, New York, 1963, 1968; and Pratt Institute, New York, 1965-67. Professor of Sculpture, School of Visual Arts, New York; lecturer, Lebanon College, New York University; critic, New York Studio School. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1973; Outstanding Visual Arts Achievement Award, Women's Caucus for Art, New York, 1980; Skowhegan Medal, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 1984; MacDowell Medalist, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1990; The Sculpture Center Award for Distinction in Sculpture 1990, The Sculpture Center, New York; Lifetime Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center, Washington D.C., 1991; Grand Prix National de Sculpture by the French Ministry of Culture, 1992; NORD/LB art prize 1992; Mayor's Awards for Art & Culture, New York City, 1993; Maison Francaise, New York University, 1993; Biennial Award, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, and The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa-ken, Japan, 1995; First Annual Urban Glass Award for Innovative Use of Glass by a Non-Glass Artist, 1996; National Medal of Arts, 1997; Academician of the National Academy, New York, 1998; Citation from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, 1998; Wexner Prize, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 1999; Golden Lion, for a living master of contemporary art, LaBiennale di Venezia, 1999; Praemium Imperiale Award, Japan Art Association, 1999; Honorary Member, Akademie Der Bildenden Kunste Wien, 2000. . Honorary doctorates: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1977; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1981; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, 1983; Maryland Art Institute, Baltimore, 1984; The New School, New York, 1987; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 1993; Art Institute of Chicago, 1995; Harvard University, 1999; Art Institute of Boston, 2000. Address: c/o Cheim & Read Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10011, U.S.A.

WORKS
* Individual Exhibitions:

* 1945: Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York
* 1947: Norlyst Gallery, New York
* 1949: Peridot Gallery, New York
* 1950: Peridot Gallery, New York
* 1953: Peridot Gallery, New York
* Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago
* 1959: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
* 1964: The Stable Gallery, New York
* Rose Fried Gallery, New York
* 1974: 112 Greene Street Gallery, New York
* 1975: Stable Gallery, New York
* 1978: Structures, Xavier Fourcade Inc., New York
* Confrontations, Hamilton Gallery, New York
* 1979: Sculptures 1941-53, Xavier Fourcade Inc., New York
* Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley
* 1980: The Iconography of Louise Bourgeois, Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York
* Sculpture: The Middle Years 1955-1970, Xavier Fourcade Inc., New York
* 1981: University of Chicago
* 1982: Robert Miller Gallery, New York
* Museum of Modern Art, New York (retrospective; travelled to Chicago and Akron, Ohio, 1983)
* 1984: Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco
* Robert Miller Gallery, New York
* 1985: Serpentine Gallery, London
* Galerie Maeght-Lelong, Zurich
* Galerie Maeght-Lelong, Paris (retrospective)
* 1986: Eyes Gallery, Doris Freedman Plaza, New York
* Texas Gallery, Dallas
* 1987: Robert Miller Gallery, New York
* Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
* Taft Museum, Cincinnati (toured the United States, 1987-90)
* 1989: -91 Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective Exhibition, Frankfurter Kunstverein, West Germany (traveled to Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Musée d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France, Fondacion Tapies, Barcelona, Spain, Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland, and Kröller-Muller-Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands)
* 1990: Musée d'Art Contemporain, Lyon (retrospective)
* 1993: -96 American Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy (expanded as The Locus of Memory and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany, and Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, Canada)
* 1994: Louise Bourgeois: The Personages, The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (traveled to Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City)
* Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany
* 1994: -96 Louise Bourgeois: Print Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York (traveled to the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Musée du Dessin et de l'Estampe Originale, Gravelines, France, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, The Netherlands)
* 1995: Louise Bourgeois: Pensée Plumes, Musée National d'art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (traveled to Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland)
* 1995: -96 Louise Bourgeois, MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico (traveled to Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain, and Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City)
* 1996: Louise Bourgeois: Drawings, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (traveled to The Drawing Center, New York, and the List Visual Art Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston)
* 1997: Louise Bourgeois: Ode a Ma Mere, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
* Louise Bourgeois, Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne
* Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, Prada Foundation, Milan, Italy
* 1997: -98 Louise Bourgeois: Homesickness, Yokohama Museum, Tokyo, Japan
* 1998: Sacred and Fatal: The Art of Louise Bourgeois, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
* Louise Bourgeois: Topiary, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, " (4/15-4/26/98)
* 1998: -99 Louise Bourgeois, Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (traveled to Foundation Belem, Lisbon, Portugal, Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden, and Serpentine Gallery, London, England)
* 1999: -2000 Louise Bourgeois: Architecture and Memory, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte-Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
* 2000: Louise Bourgeois: Inaugural Installation of the Tate Modern Art at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
* Louise Bourgeois: The Space of Memory, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyungki-do, Korea
* 2001: -2001 Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Series, Tate Modern, London
* Louise Bourgeois, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (travelled to Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland)

* Selected Group Exhibitions:

* 1945: Whitney Annual, Whitney Museum, New York (and regularly until 1973)
* 1969: International Sculpture Biennale, Carrara, Italy
* 1975: 200 Years of American Sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
* 1977: Permanent Collection of American Art, Whitney Museum, New York
* 1980: The Originals: Women in Art, Graham Gallery, New York
* 1981: Decade of Transition 1940-50, Whitney Museum, New York
* 1982: Sculpture 1982: 20 American Artists, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
* 1983: Portrait Sculpture, State University of New York, Buffalo
* 1985: Traces: Sculpture and Monuments, Kunsthaus, Zurich
* 1987: Von Chaos un Ordnung der Seele, Universitat Mainz, West Germany

* Collections:

* Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia
* British Museum, London, England
* Brooklyn Museum, New York
* Denver Art Museum, Denver
* Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, Michigan
* Guggenheim Museum, New York
* Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
* Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
* Museum of Modern Art, New York
* Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria
* Musée d'art Contemporain de Montreal, Canada
* Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France
* Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
* National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
* New York Public Library, New York
* Tate Gallery, London, England
* Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy
* Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

* Installations:

* Musee d'Art Moderne, Choisy le Roi, France, 1996
* Toi Et Moi, Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, 1997
* The Welcoming Hands, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 2000

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