Louise Bourgeois

1. Late French Feminist Sculptor

2. Biography

 Louise Bourgeois is a French
artist who was born on the
25th of December, 1911. She is
considered a feminist artist
due to her feminist
exploration of the role of the
woman, which feature as
main parts in much of her
work.

3. Biography – Early Life

 Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois was
raised by parents who ran a tapestry restoration
business. A gifted student, she also helped out in
the workshop by drawing missing elements in
the scenes depicted on the tapestries. During this
time, her father carried on an affair with Sadie
Gordon Richmond, the English tutor who lived in
the family house. This deeply troubling—and
ultimately defining—betrayal remained a vivid
memory for Bourgeois for the rest of her life.
 Later, she would study mathematics before
eventually turning to art. She met Robert
Goldwater, an American art historian, in Paris
and they married and moved to New York in
1938. The couple raised three sons.

4. Biography – Early Career

 Early on, Bourgeois focused on painting
and printmaking, turning to sculpture
only in the later 1940s. However, by the
1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in
her production as she became immersed
in psychoanalysis. Then, in 1964, for an
exhibition after a long hiatus, Bourgeois
presented strange, organically shaped
plaster sculptures that contrasted
dramatically with the totemic wood
pieces she had exhibited earlier. But
alternating between forms, materials,
and scale, and veering between
figuration and abstraction became a
basic part of Bourgeois’s vision, even
while she continually probed the same
themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and
fear.
Bourgeois’s idiosyncratic approach
found few champions in the years
when formal issues dominated art
world thinking. But by the 1970s and
1980s, the focus had shifted to the
examination of various kinds of
imagery and content.

5. Biography – Peak of Career

 In 1982, at 70 years old,
Bourgeois finally took
center stage with a
retrospective at The
Museum of Modern Art.
After that, she was filled
with new confidence and
forged ahead, creating
monumental spiders, eerie
room-sized “Cells,”
evocative figures often
hanging from wires, and a
range of fabric works
fashioned from her old
clothes.

6. Biography – Late Career

 All the while she constantly
made drawings on paper, day
and night, and also returned to
printmaking. Art was her tool
for coping; it was an exorcism.
As she put it, “Art is a
guarantee of sanity.” Bourgeois
died in New York in 2010, at
the age of 98.

7. Femme Maison (1945-47)

 The following works are a series created by
Bourgeois. When viewing these works, I want you to
answer the following questions as you see fit.
 What is the role of the woman?
 What is the role of the audience and who is the
audience?
 What could the placement of the houses and the
figures represent?

8. 

9. Artist Quote

 A note in her diary in 1980 that read:
The only access we have to our volcanic unconscious and
to the profound motives for our actions and reactions is
through shocks of our encounters with specific people.
 Homework: Sketch an image of yourself (clothed!!!) with
something encasing your head that you feel is something
that traps you, or holds you back in life. Take a picture of
it, swap images with someone in the class and analyse
each other’s works using the Subjective Frame.