Bourgeois, Louise (1911-2010), was a French-born American sculptor, painter, and graphic artist. She won critical acclaim for her sculptures that use the human figure as a starting point, as well as for her abstract and environmental sculptures. Bourgeois’s work typically consists of symbolic objects that express themes of loneliness, frustration, and vulnerability.
As a sculptor, Bourgeois worked in a variety of materials, including wood, plaster, plastics, latex, marble, bronze, and steel. Her earliest humanoid sculptures were made of wood. Among her best-known sculptures are abstract works titled The Blind Leading the Blind (1947-1949). She created plaster or latex “lair” pieces in the 1960’s that are womblike or nestlike enclosures with hidden interiors that seem like places of refuge or entrapment. Bourgeois’s Cumul series emphasizes an oval or semi-oval shape, a recurring feature of her work, and refers to the shape of cumulus cloud formations. These shapes are apparent in such works as Cumul I and Avanza Revisited (1972). Bourgeois’s most notable paintings include those in the Femme-Maison (House-Woman) series of 1947, in which women are depicted with houses where their heads should be.
In the 1970’s, Bourgeois’s work became more autobiographical and theatrical. A piece called Confrontation (1978) consisted of molded latex shapes arranged on a long dining table and surrounded by a fence of wooden panels. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a major retrospective of Bourgeois’s work in 1982, which brought her work the recognition of the mainstream art world. In 1992, her work was selected for the prestigious annual art exhibition Documenta in Kassel, Germany. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale Exhibition in 1993. She continued to explore the human figure, often in a malformed state, in her sculpture during this period, and also experimented with hybrid animal forms. Much of her later work refers to the traumatic nature of various events of her childhood. Bourgeois also produced a large number of prints and drawings. Her collected writings, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, were published in 1998.
Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, in Paris, where her parents ran a tapestry restoration business. She studied mathematics and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris but then became attracted to the fine arts. From 1936 to 1938, she took art courses at various art schools in Paris, including theÉcole du Louvre and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She developed an interest in sculpture through a love of solid geometry and the influence of one of her teachers, the French artist Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York City. Bourgeois became a U.S. citizen in 1953 and taught at various universities in the eastern United States. She died on May 31, 2010.
