Background

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911 in Paris, France. She was a daughter of Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. Louise's parents were the owners of the gallery, that dealt with antique tapestries.

In 1938, Louise Joséphine Bourgeois arrived in the United States and some time later, in 1953, she became a United States citizen.

Education

In 1932, Louise entered the University of Paris to study mathematics, but abandoned that discipline for art. In 1935, she graduated from the university. Since 1936 till 1938, Bourgeois attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Louise also attended École du Louvre, Académie Colarossi, Académie Ranson, Académie Julian and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Her mentors were André Lhote, Fernand Léger, Paul Colin and Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, who was known as Cassandre.

Also, after her arrival in New York, Louise attended Art Students League of New York.

She received numerous honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from several educational institutions, including Yale University, California College of the Arts, Art Institute of Chicago and others.

Career

Upon her arrival in New York, Bourgeois immersed herself in painting, printmaking and drawing. Louise's preoccupation with the intellectual conception of line, surface and form (principles of Analytical Cubism) became the stylistic foundation for her works on paper and canvas. Within one year, she exhibited her works in print exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Print Club, the Library of Congress and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1945, she was given her first solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York. The following year, Louise began exhibiting her paintings in many Abstract Expressionist group shows. During this decade, while her colleagues were turning toward pure abstraction, Bourgeois embraced aspects of Surrealism and Automatism, exemplified in her Femme-Maison series. Also, she began to develop a very personal symbolic iconography, based upon the events, that shaped her life in France. It was also at this time, when Bourgeois began to explore the three-dimensional qualities of her design and abandoned painting for sculpture. In 1949, she made her sculpture debut at the Peridot Gallery. Bourgeois almost immediately investigated the possibilities of wood. The sculpted totem-like forms, reminiscent of a shuttle, used for weaving, became symbols for her family members and a signature shape, associated with Bourgeois throughout her career in the mid-1950's and the mid-1960's.

Bourgeois turned from the media of wood and plaster to latex, marble and bronze in the mid-1960's. She began to sculpt landscapes, exemplified by Clamart, the burial place of her parents and grandparents, and Cumulus I, a study of cloud formations. Both are studies of the calming and tranquil effects of the heavens and earth, and each reflects Louise's love of repetitive conical shapes, erupting through a thin layer of skin. Concurrently, Bourgeois began to explore her sexual psyche through similar forms. Unlike her Femme Maison, Femme Maison 81 is no longer a surreal expose of a female, whose head is replaced with her home. It is a series of phallic totems, growing in various directions.

In 1973, Bourgeois started teaching at the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. From 1974 until 1977, she taught printmaking and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Louise also taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island.

In 1978, Bourgeoise was commissioned to create Facets of the Sun, her first public sculpture. At the age of 82, Louise Bourgeois represented the United States in the prestigious 1993 Venice Biennale. In 1994, she displayed her Red Rooms at Peter Blum Gallery in New York. The work consists of two bedrooms, representing parent and child respectively. The rooms, drenched in red and rife with symbolic furnishings, typify her highly personal themes. The work is intended to expose moods from her childhood.

Also, she was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982 and at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Múller in Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1991.

In 2010, which was the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. She created the piece "I Do", depicting two flowers, growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization "Freedom to Marry".

Achievements

• Louise's most famous works are "Cells", "Maman" and "The Destruction of the Father". In 2015, her work "Spider" was sold at Christie's auction for $28.2 million.
  
  Also, Bourgeois received many awards during her lifetime, including Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (1991), National Medal of Arts (1997), Praemium Imperiale (1999), Golden Lion (1999), Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005), National Order of the Legion of Honour (2008) and others.
  
  Her works are kept in the collections of numerous museums and institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum Basel and others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed: Psychoanalytic Writings 2012

• installation

  • View of exhibition installation in the Peridot Gallery 1950

  • Untitled

  • No Exit

  • Dangerous passage

  • Confrontation

  • Precious Liquid

  • Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands)

  • Cell 3, White Marble Spheres

  • Number Seventy-Two

  • Defiance

  • Cell: You Better Grow Up

  • Cell VII

  • Red Room (Child)

  • Pink Days and Blue Days

  • Characters

• painting

  • Untitled

  • The Big Bed with Quilt

  • Sleeping Man

  • The Ainu Tree

  • Empty Nest

  • Amputee with Crutch

  • Ode to the Forgotten

  • The view from the bottom of the well

  • Ode to the Bievre

  • Tree with Shoes

  • Birth

  • The Waiting Hours

  • Sublimation

  • Tree

  • Family

  • Just hanging

  • Untitled

  • Triptych for the red room

  • The Olive Branch

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • The Cross-Eyed Woman

  • It doesn't end

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • My hand

  • The Reticent Child, Figurines and mirror

  • Change the Direction of the Music Staff

  • A Stretch of Time

  • Looking for the mother

  • Toilette

  • Hands

  • Self-portrait

  • When I Was Young

  • The Fragile

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Yvon lambert

  • Too much love

  • Sublimation

  • Tree with Woman

  • Couples

  • The Fragile

  • Ode to the Bievre

  • Untitled

  • I wanted to love you more

  • Tree with Red Crutch

  • Untitled

  • Amputee with Peg Leg

  • Be Calme (October 1st - 31st)

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • The fabric works

  • Take Me Right Back to the Track Jack

  • The Fragile

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Feet

  • Girl with Hair

  • Sublimation

  • Sewing

  • Children in Tub

  • Woman-House

  • Man, Keys, Phone, Clock

  • The Fragile

  • Woman

  • The Family (detail)

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • A million ways to cum

  • The Family

  • Reaching for you

  • Amputee

  • Scissors

  • Be Calme (October 1st - 31st)

  • Woman with Suitcase

  • Sculptress

  • Ode to the Bievre

  • Be Calme (October 1st - 31st)

  • I just died at birth

  • The fabric works board

  • Pregnant Woman

  • Woman and Clock

  • Untitled

  • Deep inside my heart

  • I lost you

  • Sublimation

  • Fugue

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Sublimation

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • On the occasion of Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon

  • The Fragile

  • I am looking for Mothers

  • Woman in Bathtub

  • Blue Dress

  • Ode to the Bievre

  • Untitled

• sculpture

  • End of Softness

  • Mamelles

  • Janus Fleuri

  • Eye Benches I

  • Untitled

  • Fragile Goddess

  • Spider

  • Spider

  • Fragile Goddess

  • Father and Son

  • Avenza Revisited II

  • Cell XVIII (Portrait)

  • Give or Take

  • A girl

  • Eye Benches II

  • Amoeba

  • Mother and Child

  • Maman

  • Cell XXVI

  • Do you love me?

  • Spider II

  • Portrait

  • Arch of Hysteria

  • Paddle Woman

  • Woman-House

  • The Couple

  • Cell (Choisy)

  • The Welcoming Hands

  • Temper Tantrum

  • Soft Landscape II

  • Janus

  • The Blind Leading the Blind

  • Couple IV

  • Soft Landscape I

  • Woman-Knife

  • Untitled

  • St. Sebastien

  • Woman-House

  • Cell XXIII (Portrait)

  • The Woven Child

  • Woman

  • Cell (Eyes and Mirrors)

  • The destruction of the father

  • Disembodied Hands

  • Untitled

  • Avenza

  • The Woven Child

  • Germinal

  • Seven in Bed

  • The Nest

  • Spider

  • I Do, I Undo and I Redo

  • Couple

  • Hanging Janus with Jacket

  • Soft Landscape

  • Eye Benches

  • Untitled

  • Cell XII (Portrait)

  • Topiary

  • Portrait of Robert

  • Harmless Woman

  • Partial Recall

Views

Quotations: "Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning."

"Art is manipulation without intervention."

"Art is a guaranty of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said."

"An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing."

"The colour blue - that is my colour - and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into - not a world of fantasy, it's not a world of fantasy - but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don't like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue."

"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

"To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence."

"I work like a bee and feel that I accomplish little."

"My knives are like a tongue - I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don’t love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife."

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1981

• 

  National Academy of Design , United States

  1990

• American Abstract Artists Group , United States

  1954

Connections

In 1938, Bourgeois married Robert Goldwater, who was an art historian. Their marriage produced three children — Alain Bourgeois, Jean-Louis Bourgeois and Michel Bourgeois. Michel died in 1990.

Father:

Louis Bourgeois

Mother:

Joséphine Fauriaux

child:

Alain Bourgeois

child:

Jean-Louis Bourgeois

child:

Michel Bourgeois

husband:

Robert Goldwater

mentor:

André Lhote

mentor:

Fernand Léger

mentor:

Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron

References

• Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
  2017
• Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois
  2016
• Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois
  2016
• Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works
  2011
• Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence: The Cells
  2017