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Louise Bourgeois
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Louise Bourgeois (; 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.
Early 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.
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Encyclopedia
Louise Bourgeois (; 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.
Early 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.
She lives and works in New York City.
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.
Maman now stands outside Tate Modern in London. 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.
The installations were later dismantled, the spider sculpture ("Maman") was relocated to Ottawa, where it stands outside the entrance to the National Gallery of Canada.
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.
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. 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."
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.
Gallery
See also
List of artworks by Louise Bourgeois
Books
- Marika Herskovic, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
- Marika Herskovic, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6
- , 2007 [Exhibition catalog].
Further reading
- 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
Video
External links
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