Louise Bourgeois

Louise Josephine Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the second of three children of Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois ^[1]. Her parents ran a gallery dealing in antique tapestries, and soon after her birth the family moved its restoration workshop out of the city, first to Choisy-le-Roi and later to Antony on the river Bievre, whose waters were used to wash the wool ^[2]. As a girl Louise helped in the workshop, drawing in the missing sections of damaged tapestries, often the feet and lower borders. That early work with textiles, repair, and imagery stayed with her for the rest of her life.

The household was prosperous but strained. Her father carried on a long affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the English governess hired to teach the children, while her mother, whom Louise adored, tolerated the arrangement ^[1]. Bourgeois later described the betrayal and her mother's endurance as the founding wounds of her art, returning to them in interviews, diaries, and works for more than seventy years ^[3]. Her mother suffered from chronic illness after the 1918 influenza pandemic, and Louise nursed her through repeated episodes until Josephine died in 1932.

Who was Louise Bourgeois before she became an artist? A gifted student, first of all. She entered the Sorbonne in 1930 to study mathematics and geometry, drawn to the stability of measurable systems ^[2]. Her mother's death broke that path. She abandoned mathematics for art, later saying that only art dealt with the emotional material she needed to master.

During the 1930s Bourgeois moved through the studios and academies of Paris, studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and with independent teachers including the painter Fernand Leger, who told her that her real talent was for sculpture rather than painting ^[2]. She also worked briefly as a docent at the Louvre and opened a small print shop beside her family's tapestry gallery. There, in 1938, she met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian who had come in as a customer. They married that year, and she left for New York with him ^[1].

New York in the 1940s gave her both a community and an audience, though a modest one at first. She studied at the Art Students League, exhibited prints and paintings, and in 1945 had her first solo show of paintings at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery ^[4]. Her circle overlapped with the exiled Surrealists and with the emerging Abstract Expressionists, but she belonged fully to neither camp. By the late 1940s she had turned decisively to sculpture, carving and assembling tall, thin wooden figures she called Personages, stand-ins for people she had left behind in France. Peridot Gallery showed them in 1949 and 1950, installed directly on the floor so that viewers walked among them like a crowd ^[4].

Recognition then stalled for a long time. Through the 1950s and much of the 1960s she exhibited only occasionally, raised three sons, and worked in relative privacy while the art world's attention went elsewhere ^[3]. She became an American citizen in 1955. In the 1960s her materials shifted from wood to plaster, latex, bronze, and marble, and her forms grew more bodily: lairs, clusters, and hybrid anatomical shapes such as the marble Cumul series. The 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, organized by the critic Lucy Lippard, placed her alongside much younger artists and signaled that her moment was approaching ^[4].

Any account of Louise Bourgeois achievements begins with the 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the museum's first such survey devoted to a woman sculptor ^[5]. Bourgeois was seventy years old. The exhibition, accompanied by her photo essay Child Abuse in Artforum, in which she openly connected her art to her father's affair with her governess, transformed her from a respected insider's artist into a major public figure ^[3]. Rather than treating the retrospective as a summit, she used it as a launch. The most famous work of her career still lay ahead.

In the late 1980s and 1990s she developed the Cells, room-sized enclosures built from old doors, wire mesh, and salvaged windows, filled with charged objects: glass spheres, tapestry fragments, mirrors, carved marble hands. Each Cell staged a psychological situation that viewers could peer into but rarely enter ^[5]. In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 1999 the Biennale awarded her its Golden Lion for lifetime achievement ^[2].

Then came the spiders. Bourgeois had drawn spiders as early as the 1940s, but in the 1990s she built them at architectural scale, presenting the spider as a portrait of her mother: a weaver, a repairer, patient and protective ^[6]. The largest, a steel and marble sculpture more than nine meters high titled Maman, was commissioned for the opening of Tate Modern in London in 2000, where it stood in the Turbine Hall as part of the museum's inaugural display ^[6]. Bronze casts of Maman have since been shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and other institutions, making it one of the most widely recognized sculptures of recent decades. Among further honors, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1997 and the French Legion of Honor in 2008 ^[2].

Bourgeois and Robert Goldwater remained married from 1938 until his death in 1973. Goldwater, a pioneering scholar of so-called primitivism in modern art and later the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, supported her work steadily through the lean decades ^[1]. The couple adopted a son, Michel, in France before settling in New York, and had two more sons, Jean-Louis and Alain ^[3]. From 1962 the family home was a brownstone on West 20th Street in Chelsea, which doubled as her studio and, in old age, as the site of her celebrated Sunday salons, where young artists brought work for her blunt and sometimes withering assessment ^[7].

She was candid about the psychological engine of her practice. Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis for many years beginning in the early 1950s, a fact confirmed when caches of her analytic writings were discovered and studied after 2004 ^[3]. She described her sculpture as a form of self-treatment, a way to give fear a shape so it could be managed. Insomnia plagued her for decades, and she filled hundreds of sheets with drawings made during sleepless nights, later exhibited as The Insomnia Drawings.

Among the plainer Louise Bourgeois facts: she was small in stature, fierce in conversation, fluent in the languages of geometry and psychoanalysis alike, and she worked nearly every day into her ninety-ninth year. Assistants, most notably Jerry Gorovoy, who worked with her from 1980 onward, helped her realize large projects as her physical strength declined ^[7].

Old age brought Bourgeois the sustained attention that had eluded her in midlife, and she met it with astonishing productivity. In her eighties and nineties she produced the monumental spiders, new Cells, and a long series of fabric works, sewing figures and abstract compositions from her own stockpiled clothing, table linens, and tapestry scraps, closing the circle that had opened in her parents' restoration workshop ^[5]. Holograms, prints, and illustrated books occupied her as well; printmaking, her first trade in Paris, remained a constant, and the Museum of Modern Art has catalogued thousands of her printed compositions ^[4].

Major institutions competed to survey the work. Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou organized a large retrospective that traveled between 2007 and 2008, drawing enormous audiences and confirming her standing at the summit of contemporary art while she was still alive to see it ^[6]. She rarely traveled by then, remaining in Chelsea, but continued making work and receiving visitors.

Bourgeois died of heart failure on May 31, 2010, in New York City, at the age of ninety-eight ^[1]. She had reportedly completed work in the final week of her life. Her death was reported on front pages internationally, an outcome few would have predicted for the artist who had spent the 1950s in near obscurity.

Bourgeois changed what sculpture was allowed to be about. By insisting that childhood memory, sexuality, jealousy, and fear were legitimate structural material for serious art, she opened territory later occupied by generations of artists, and feminist art historians in particular have treated her as a foundational figure, even though she resisted the feminist label for her own work ^[5]. Critics who assemble any Louise Bourgeois biography confront the same paradox she cultivated: a body of work that is intensely autobiographical yet formally rigorous, moving between abstraction and figuration without settling in either.

Her market and museum presence have only grown. Maman casts anchor collections from Bilbao to Ottawa to Doha, and in 2023 her sculpture Spider (1996) sold at auction for 32.8 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a work by a woman artist ^[8]. The Easton Foundation, which she established, maintains her Chelsea house and archive and supports scholarship on her work ^[7].

What is Louise Bourgeois famous for, in the end? For the spiders, certainly, and for the Cells, but above all for proving that an artist's most private material can carry public, monumental weight, and that a career can crest in its tenth decade. Museums including MoMA, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim hold her work in depth, and exhibitions of her sculpture, fabric works, and drawings continue to travel worldwide ^[4][6].