Louise Bourgeois

LOUISE BOURGEOIS Paris 1911 - New York 2010

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois was raised by parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. As a talented student, she also assisted in the workshop by drawing missing elements in the scenes depicted on the tapestries. During this time, her father had an affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the English tutor who lived in the family's home. This deeply distressing—and ultimately formative—betrayal remained a vivid memory for Bourgeois throughout her life. Later on, she would study mathematics before fully dedicating herself to art. Bourgeois met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, in Paris, and they married and moved to New York in 1938. The couple raised three children. Initially, Bourgeois focused on painting and printmaking, only turning to sculpture in the late 1940s. However, in the 1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in her production as she delved into psychoanalysis. Then, in 1964, for an exhibition after a long hiatus, Bourgeois presented strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures that sharply contrasted with the totemic wooden pieces she had previously shown. But the alternation between forms, materials, and scale, as well as the shifting between figuration and abstraction, became a fundamental part of Bourgeois' vision, even as she continuously explored the same themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear. Bourgeois' idiosyncratic approach found few champions in the years when formal concerns dominated the art world's thinking. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, attention had shifted towards the examination of various types of imagery and content. In 1982, at the age of 70, Bourgeois finally took center stage with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. From then on, she gained renewed confidence and took a leap forward, creating monumental spiders, unsettling room-sized "Cells," evocative figures often suspended by threads, and a series of fabric works shaped from her old clothing. Throughout, she consistently made drawings on paper, day and night, and also returned to printmaking. Art was her tool for coping; it was an exorcism. As she said, "Art is a guarantee of sanity." Bourgeois passed away in New York in 2010 at the age of 98.

MOMA Official