Late French Feminist Sculptor

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.

Biography

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.

Biography – Early Life

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.

Biography – Early Career

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.

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.

Biography – Peak of 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.

Biography – Late Career

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?

Femme Maison (1945-47)

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.

Artist Quote