Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois was a prominent French-American artist born on December 25, 1911, in Paris. She is celebrated for her innovative sculptures, paintings, and prints that often explore complex themes related to sexuality, identity, and personal history. Bourgeois began her artistic journey in tapestry restoration but later shifted her focus to sculpture after her mother's death. Throughout her seventy-year career, she worked with a diverse range of materials, including marble, metal, rubber, and found objects, often incorporating personal and familial elements into her pieces.
Bourgeois is perhaps best known for her large-scale sculptures, particularly her spider series, which features pieces like Maman, a thirty-foot tall sculpture symbolizing motherhood. Her work frequently contains organic and abstract forms, underscored by a strong psychological and emotional resonance. As an influential feminist artist, she encouraged a new generation to engage with sexual themes in their art. Bourgeois passed away on May 31, 2010, leaving a lasting impact on the art world and a legacy that continues to inspire artists today.
Louise Bourgeois
French-American sculptor and artist
- Born: December 25, 1911
- Place of Birth: Place of birth: Paris
- Died: May 31, 2010
- Place of Death: Place of death: New York, New York
Education:Sorbonne, Paris, Académie de la Grande Chaumière, École du Louvre, the École des Beaux-Arts.
Significance: Louise Bourgeois was a prolific, influential sculptor, painter, and printer who worked with different materials and methods throughout her long career.
Background
Louise Bourgeois was born on the Left Bank of Paris on December 25, 1911. She was the middle child of Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. When Bourgeois was very young, her family moved to the town of Choisy-le-Roi where it opened a tapestry restoration business. Bourgeois’s earliest artistic endeavors included drawing the missing pieces of tapestries to help in their restoration.
Bourgeois’s mother was an invalid, and her children were cared for by a live-in governess. When Bourgeois was a child, her father’s ten-year-long affair with the governess came to light. This revelation impacted her relationship with her father and affected her work throughout her life.
Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne in 1930 to study mathematics and geometry. However, after her mother’s death in 1932, she changed her course of study to art. When her father refused to support her education in a subject he thought was useless, Bourgeois found ways to earn money to pay her tuition, including serving as a translator for other students. When French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) saw the sculpting she had done in college, he encouraged her to focus her artistic efforts mainly on sculpting instead of painting.
After completing her studies at the Sorbonne, Bourgeois attended several other art schools and also found opportunities to work and study alongside artists in studios across Paris. She opened a print store near her father’s tapestry shop and met her husband there when he came in to buy some prints. Shortly after their marriage in 1938, the couple moved to New York City.
Life’s Work
The majority Bourgeois’ work during her seventy-year career was organic and abstract in appearance but had an underlying sexual theme. For example, a 1974 sculpture titled The Destruction of the Father includes a number of indistinct objects resembling human breasts and sexual organs around a shape that looks like a disemboweled body on a table. Her 1984 sculpture Nature Study depicts a headless sphinx with many breasts. Among Bourgeois’ most famous works, Fillette (the French word for "little girl") is made of rubber and can be interpreted as either breasts below a long, thin neck or male genitalia. The artist herself attributes the inspiration for these and other sculptures with similar vague sexual images to her reaction to her father’s affair.
Bourgeois used both conventional and unusual materials in her art. She sculpted in marble, metal, and stone, as many sculptors have for centuries, but also in rubber and common household objects. She began her career as a sculptor using discarded objects that she found to create her art, a practice she would follow throughout her life. Sometimes, she created sculptures using discarded clothing that once belonged to her family.
Beginning in the 1980s, Bourgeois created her Cells sculpture
series. These sculptures are sometimes large enough for the observer to enter but are usually designed to require the observer to peer into and around parts of the sculpture to see the entire creation. Sculptures in this series feature a metal structure filled with a collection of found objects, such as perfume bottles, bits of furniture or tapestries, and even a pocket watch that once belonged to her grandfather.
Found objects are also part of Bourgeois’s infamous sculptures of spiders. Spiders played a recurring role in her art throughout her career. The earliest known depiction in 1947 is of a spider with stiff legs and multiple eyes drawn in ink and charcoal. She also drew and painted other spiders and even created some tapestry-type fabric pieces depicting spider webs. The sculptures in her Spider series are several stories tall and therefore must be displayed outdoors or in large halls. The largest of these, Maman, was created in 1990 and is about thirty feet tall and thirty-three feet wide. Maman (the French word for "mommy") has thin, arched steel legs supporting a body of twisted steel and a metal egg sac containing eggs made of marble.
Bourgeois, who became reclusive in her later years, died of a heart attack in Manhattan on May 31, 2010, at the age of 98. She was buried in Cutchogue Cemetery in Cutchogue, Suffolk County, New York.
Impact
With her giant spiders and enormous cell sculptures, Bourgeois left behind a visual legacy. She is considered one of the most influential feminist artists of her time; she encouraged many other artists to explore sexual themes in an artistic way that had not previously been tried.
Personal
In 1938, Bourgeois met American art historian Robert Goldwater at a Paris print store she owned, and they married that year. They adopted one son, Michel, in 1939 and subsequently had two sons, Jean-Louis in 1940 and Alain in 1941. They had two grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. Bourgeois was widowed in 1973; in 1990, Michel died. Jean-Louis died in 2022.
Bibliography
Corman, Catherine. " Louise Bourgeois: The Spider and the Tapestries." Huffington Post, January 2016. Web. 8 June 2016.
Cotter, Holland. "Louise Bourgeois, Influential Sculptor, Dies at 98." The New York Times, May 2010. Web. 8 June 2016.
"Louise Bourgeois: Arts in the Twenty-First Century." Public Broadcasting Service,n. d. Web. 8 June 2016.
Manchester, Elizabeth. "Louise Bourgeois: Maman 1999." Tate Museum, Dec. 2009. Web. 8 June 2016.
"Obituaries: Louise Bourgeois." The Telegraph, June 2010. Web. 8 June 2016.
"Remembering Jean Louis Bourgeois." Taos News, 8 June 2023, www.taosnews.com/tempo/culture/remembering-jean-louis-bourgeois/article‗5cfe2dfc-a7c0-551b-a45c-a20968f05993.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Wroe, Nicholas. "At home with Louise Bourgeois." The Guardian, Oct. 2013. Web. 8 June 2016.