Bourgeois, Louise

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois is among the most prominent contemporary sculptors. Strongly influenced by surrealism, abstract expressionism, and minimalism, her work focuses on the exploration of her psyche. A recurring theme is her troubled childhood and difficult relationship with her father. Despite early success, she did not receive widespread acclaim until the ’70s. Her 1982 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art was the museum’s first-ever retrospective of a woman artist. Since then, she has exhibited worldwide, producing a beguiling body of work featuring spiders, cages, architectural sculptures, drawings, and found objects ranging in scale from intimate to monumental. Her staggering variety of mediums includes rubber, wood, stone, metal, and fabric. In 1993, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. This book accompanies a major retrospective touring exhibition. An overview of Bourgeois’s career, it covers individual works, art movements, other artists, and themes that have played an important role in her life and art, with text by acclaimed authors and critics, including Julia Kristeva, Elisabeth Lebovici, Frances Morris, Mignon Nixon, Linda Nochlin, Robert Storr, Alex Potts, Marina Warner, and Deborah Wye. Exhibition Schedule:Tate Modern, London (October 11, 2007–January 20, 2008) Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (March 5–June 2008) Guggenheim Museum, New York (June 27–September 28, 2008) LAMoCA (October 25, 2008–January 25, 2009) Hirshhorn, Washington (February 28–June 7, 2009 tentative)

Parkett No. 82: Pawel Althamer, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison (Parkett)

Parkett 82 features sculptor, diarist and preeminent Feminist Louise Bourgeois; the theatrical, shamanistic Polish artist Pawel Althamer and New York sculptor Rachel Harrison. Essayists on Bourgeois include Robert Storr, whose text is aptly called "Mother of Them All/Sister of Some," Tracey Emin and Griselda Pollock, while Althamer's collaborators are Massimiliano Gioni, Catherine Wood and Adam Szymczyk. Harrison's work is discussed by Ina Blom, Richard Hawkins, George Baker and Alison Gingeras. Also in the issue are texts by Burkhard Meltzer on Susan Philipsz, Jan Verwoert on WACK, Jeremy Sigler on Brock Enright, Kenneth Goldsmith on UbuWeb and Suzanne Hudson on the 60s hippie retreat Esalen. The Cumulus texts are by Mark von Schlegell and Catherine Chevalier. There is an insert by Sadie Benning and the spine is by Paulina Olowska.

Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997

edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist


"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor."

Since the age of twelve, the internationally renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois has been writing and drawing--first a diary precisely recounting the everyday events of her family life, then notes and reflections. Destruction of the Father--the title comes from the name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in 1973--contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images.

Writing is a means of expression that has gained increasing importance for Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing is compulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by her intellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense of literary form (she has frequently published articles on artists, exhibitions, and art events). Bourgeois, a private woman "without secrets," has given numerous interviews to journalists, artists, and writers, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hidden meanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumas of her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative process.

Louise Bourgeois

American sculptor, painter and printmaker, born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois is an exceptional figure in the contemporary art world. Her career spans some seventy years and touches upon such key moments as Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and feminism. After a lifetime of little artistic recognition, Bourgeois now enjoys cult status. An extraordinarily influential sculptor, she has worked, often experimentally, with a huge variety of materials. She is equally admired for her intimate drawings, often combining fragments of text, and her highly personal writings, which often address her long and complex life story. Themes such as the Other, the feminine and the masculine, and the body - as well as her own specific biography - spin a tangled and intense life-long body of work of unusual profundity.

Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells

Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells is both a catalog of works by and a biography of the famous Parisian artist. Born in 1911, the now-octogenarian Bourgeois has shown widely throughout the world and to great critical acclaim, especially within the last decade. Bourgeois's personal history is vastly important in the content of her work, and this book takes readers on a journey from her affluent childhood in France, including family photographs, to her schooling under painter Fernand Léger to her eventual marriage and move to the United States, where she continued her long and varied career working primarily as a sculptor and installation artist.

Bourgeois's abstract figurative sculptures range in materials from plaster, marble, and bronze to the more nontraditional latex, glass, thread, etc. Regardless of the medium, the work is imbued with a strong physicality that echoes the forms of the human body. Included in the book are discussions of Bourgeois's work in relation to other artists and movements such as Rodin, Brancusi, and primitivism. Bourgeois has been an inspiration to an entire generation of artists, not just because of her long and illustrious career but because her work has pushed so many boundaries. Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells is an informative and beautiful book with 77 color and 176 black-and-white images. --Jennifer Cohen

Now available in a flexi format, this introduction to the art of the renowned sculptor focuses on Louise Bourgeois Cell installations, while placing them in the context of her influential work.

Since the 1930s Bourgeois has worked with materials ranging from rubber, wood, fabric, and metal to glass, paper, cement, and marble, through which she has told the stories of her own life and the lives of others. The artist s stylistic diversity is as broad as the materials she employs. This book also traces Bourgeois life from her youth as the daughter of Parisian textile workers and her years studying under Ferdinand Leger, through her experiences with the leading artists of the New York School in the 40s and 50s, up to her famed large and often controversial installations. In addition, this generously illustrated book presents the complete cycle of Cell installations from the 1990s. In these contained environments Bourgeois reflects on the human tendency toward isolation and on her own memories. Together these works reveal the evolution of a sculptor s career.

Louise Bourgeois: Aller-Retour

Over the past intensely productive decade, Louise Bourgeois's drawings have been dominated by diary-like work in which text and sign often mix. This extensive compendium of that work and its antecedents shares a series design with her recent book of sculpture, and the dialogue between mediums is lively in both titles, which also share a determination to put Bourgeois's current work in the context of her oeuvre, not just her work in other mediums but her work of other eras. Long denied due recognition, Bourgeois became an avant-garde superstar late in life, and is today, at 94, considered "a great figure of the postmodern" (Peter Weiermair). Since the 1980s, her work has followed the prevalent notion of art that rejects universal style and formal understanding in favor of a personal approach. Her central concern lies in establishing an intense, open discussion on the dialectics of thoughts and feelings, on the internal conflict wrought by external relationships. Here, some 150 works are grouped thematically around motifs such as "rivers," "spiders" and "proverbs/aper us." A separate retrospective section of older works allows the rest of the book to shift toward the present, which is full of dark and dervish-like activity. Of her prominence, Bourgeois has said, "My luck was that I became famous so late that fame could not destroy me." On the contrary, readers will agree that fame--or is it time?--has invigorated and animated Bourgeois to an exceptional degree.

Louise Bourgeois (Flammarion Contemporary Art)

This French-born artist emigrated to the United States in 1938. Bourgeois has produced a body of work that spans more than five decades, including over 25 worldwide exhibitions in 2005 alone. Famous for her highly experimental and autobiographical sculptures, Bourgeois's work also includes intimate drawings, paintings, and personal writings. She is a pioneer in tackling issues of empowerment, sexuality, and the roles of women in her diverse oeuvre. Her art can be found in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. In 1993, Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennial. Louise Bourgeois presents the artist's long and productive career through a series of essays: a retrospective text, an interview, an analysis, and over 150 images that represent the totality of the artist's output from her earliest work to her most recent projects. This comprehensive volume with its innovative design pays tribute to an original and influential artist and is an essential addition to every contemporary art-lover's collection.

Louise Bourgeois: Emotions Abstracted

Born in Paris in 1911 and a New Yorker since 1938, Louise Bourgeois created a unique oeuvre that owes no allegiance to 20th-century "isms" in the course of a career than has spanned more than 60 years. Her art is grounded in her own life and experience: "My goal is to re-experience a past emotion...to relive anxiety...anxiety is a passive state, and the object is to be active and take control." Yet Louise Bourgeois did not create an autonomous universe as an artistic hermit. While her art is nourished by personal experience, it also draws from art and art history--a wellspring of inspiration from which she developed her themes, concepts, and approach to media in both two- and three-dimensional works. Her rich and fascinating oeuvre is the subject of this publication, which presents more than 50 works from 60 years of creative activity in impressive full-color illustrations. Most of the works featured here are from the Daros Collection in Zurich.

Louise Bourgeois: La Famille

The fear of being born into the world an unwanted girl; the fear of becoming a pawn in the lives of her parents; the fear of failing as a wife, mother and artist: Over the course of her 70 years as an artist, Louise Bourgeois, born in 1911 in Paris, has always placed the psychology of family at the center of her work. Bourgeois left her homeland in 1938, without a degree, to live in New York with her husband, Robert Goldwater, a curator at The Museum of Modern Art. In 1940, the couple adopted their first son, and in 1941 Bourgeois gave birth to two more boys. Her artistic oeuvre deals almost exclusively with the fear of not being able to live up to the roles she was born into and took on. Most of her early works consisted of paintings on the theme of family, many of which have rarely, if ever, been reproduced. When she first began sculpting, she portrayed children and family members as stakes fatefully stuck in the ground, "Personnages," with windows and openings, who occasionally carried small packages, but who seemed mute and paralyzed. Her later work grew more sexualized, and after the death of her husband, she pursued the paternal element intensely. This thematic gathering of 20 paintings, more than 60 drawings, 35 sculptures and 5 embroideries made between 1935 and 2005 is also, by virtue of the centrality of family to her oeuvre, an overarching retrospective, a focused view of her career.

Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings

Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she has committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs inspiring her work. "The Insomnia Drawings" show the artist's mind at work: drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the hustle-bustle of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman's life and work: beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor. As soon as the artist agreed to entrust "The Insomnia Drawings" to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Louise Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places "The Insomnia Drawings" in context of Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois' imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. Furthermore, the second volume offers a chronology and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. This landmark publication is a must for everyone wanting to take part in the imaginative journeys of one of today's most important artists. "The Insomnia Drawings" are part of the Daros Collection. 13 x 10.25 inches, 220 illustrations.

Author Quotes:
"She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while here sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions-between plentitude and lack, proximity and absence, agreement and contradiction."-Elisabeth Bronfen

"L'art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / unafraid: Art / est le / contraire / du acting. Les paysages de nuit on / envahi les jours. Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it can be worse / / M is for mother / in the water / it is subject / to change / or even to reversal." -Louise Bourgeois