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Louise Bourgeois

Basic Biographical Information:
1. Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911 in Paris. Her parents owned an antique tapestry gallery and worked in tapestry restoration.
  1. In her youth, Bourgeois worked filling in designs in the tapestries.
    1. She originally went to school to study math, but was inspired to pursue art by her mother’s death. After studying in art school, she opened a print shop next to her father’s tapestry gallery, where she met her husband Robert Goldwater.
      1. The two had three children and were married until his death. Bourgeois created art up until the week of her death. She passed away in Manhattan on May 31, 2010.
Art Career:
1. Bourgeois began to study art in 1932. She was able to earn free tuition by working as a translator in classes that had students who only spoke English.
  1. In one of these classes, French painter Fernand Léger told her that she was a better sculptor than a painter. She studied alongside greats in the French art scene, such as Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Cassandre, and Paul Colin. Through these relationships, and by frequenting studios in Paris, Bourgeois was able to get first hand experience in the art world.
    1. She moved to New York City in 1938, and the early 40s were marked by difficulties adjusting to a new country (though, she found great success in the art world here). She enrolled in the Art Students League, and her paintings were featured in her first solo exhibition in 1945.
      1. In the mid-late 40s, she began to take on sculpting using wood scraps which she found on the roof of her apartment.
        In 1954 she joined the American Abstract Artists Group, which placed her work alongside greats such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhart, Marth Rothko, and William de Kooning.
        It was during her time in this group that she fully embraced sculpture, beginning to use materials such as marble, plaster, and bronze that are more prominently featured in her most known works.
        Her art took on topics such as the loss of control and the art of falling.
        Though she rejected the idea that her works were feminist, the female form and female sexuality all play heavily into her pieces. In the 70s, she finally aligned herself with feminist values when she joined the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist group devoted to defending the use of sexually explicit imagery in art.
        Her father passed away in 1951, sending Bourgeois into a reclusive depression. She re-emerged in 1964 with a solo exhibition at Stable Gallery in New York.
        Despite her seclusion, she remained relevant, often being shown alongside newer artists such as Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bourgeois traveled often to Italy to perfect her marble sculptures.
        1978 saw her first public work, which was Facets of the Sun, a sculpture located in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1982, she was the first female artist to be given a retrospective gallery.
        In the last year of her life, she created art to benefit Freedom to Marry, an LGBTQ+ rights organization. The piece featured two flowers growing from one stem and was entitled I Do.
        Bourgeois affirmed her support for gay marriage, stating that "Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing”.
Art Style:
1. Many of Bourgeois’ works were part of different series, this is especially true for her sculptures.
  1. She began to create the spider sculptures for which she is best known later in her career, in the 1990s, though she had made charcoal and ink drawings of the creatures in 1947. She said that spiders reminded her of her mother, who she described as dainty and clever. Bourgeois’ mother was also a weaver, calling upon the spider imagery.
    1. Her spider sculptures were cast in bronze, and ranged in size. The largest spider, Maman, was created in 2000 for the opening of the Tate Modern in London. This spider’s name is an affectionate word for mother in French.
      1. Her larger spiders, such as this one, are quite interactive. Viewers are able to walk between the arachnid’s legs, peering up at its belly.
        Some of her spider sculptures, such as the 1994 edition of the sculpture, include a cage holding an egg beneath the belly of the spider.
        Bourgeois has stated that the egg sac in this piece was inspired by her mother’s downfalls. The two had a tense relationship, and bourgeois stated that her mother was a very intense and critical person.
        Cells were another series of sculptures that Bourgeois created. She created 60 of them, the majority of which were created in her final 2 decades of life.
        Similarly to how a cell is the basic unit of life, Bourgeois’ cells encapsulated the memories of Bourgeois' early life. Each cell was like a self containing world, often drawing from her memories as a child.
        One was a replica of her parent’s room, another a replica of her childhood home, with a guillotine poised above it as if to foreshadow when her childhood would come crashing down.
        They varied more in their content than the spiders, but the basic “concept” remained the same. Cells consisted of a cage, often rectangular but at times cylindrical, with an object (often a found object) inside. The cage was typically surrounded by another structure.
        Mirrors were prominently seen in this position, though some cells feature a guillotine or even another spider sculpture. The female form is prominently featured within the cage.
        In Cell XXVI, which was created in 2003 and resides in the Guggenheim, has a distorted female form held up in front of a mirror. This piece has clear feminist undertones.
        The way that the form is distorted and forced in front of a mirror brings to mind self-perception. Perhaps this piece is meant to describe the way in which her family altered Bourgeois’ relationship with herself.
        Bourgeois also took on drawing, which also showed up in series. Femme was a drawing created on fabric.
        The drawing was created in 2006, and most prominently appeared in Louise Bourgeois, An Unfolding Portrait. The name of this exhibition invokes the sense of breaking away from the traditional sense of “womanhood”, revealing the layers beneath the stereotype.
        The woman depicted in this image is shown with stringy hair and very unexaggerated features. She does not conform to the typical standards of beauty, yet she still is unequivocally feminine, as represented by her breasts and necklace.
        Though not much analysis is publicly available on this piece, perhaps it is meant to show that conformation to beauty standards is not what makes a woman a woman.
        Bourgeois created three pairs of Eye Benches, all residing in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. They are made of black granite, and were physically formed by stone workers in Italy between 1996 and 1997.
        The eyes are always seen in pairs, with varying distances between them. In this way, the pieces implicate the land surrounding them as a part of the art, as space which lies between each eye makes up part of the “face”.
        The viewer also becomes implicated in the art, as sitting on the eyes involves them in the act of “watching”, while they are the “watched” when they stand within the eye’s gaze.
        The focus on “watching” again circles back to Bourgeois’ feminist involvement, bringing to mind the fact that women are often subject to society’s strict gaze.
        It may also be in reference to the tension which she experienced in her household as a child. The eyes also centralize the artist’s experience, causing the person sitting on the bench to view the park through Bourgeois’ gaze.
        All and all, this piece invokes voyeurism.

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