b. 1911 d. 2010
Site Affiliation: The Louise Bourgeois Home, The Easton Foundation
Louise Bourgeois worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career, including sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and printmaking. The proportions and materials of her work—such as wood, plaster, marble, bronze, and fabric—varied as much as its forms, which oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Bourgeois grew up in France amidst her parents’ tapestry restoration business. Her childhood was marked by a complicated family dynamic that later became a major source of inspiration. After her mother’s death in 1932, Bourgeois studied art in Paris until 1938, when she married Robert Goldwater and moved to New York. After decades of working with limited recognition, her 1982 MoMA retrospective brought deserved acclaim and many international exhibitions and awards. She debuted her renowned Cells in 1991 and made the first of her iconic spider sculptures in 1994, around the time she began making her fabric works. She continued working until her death in 2010.
Primary Medium: Sculpture
Fun Fact: In the 1970s, Bourgeois brought home a stray dog named Cosimo from Italy, where she had been working in marble and bronze.
Recommended Publications: Larratt-Smith, Philip, and Juliet Mitchell. Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter (The Jewish Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Rales, Emily Wei, and Ali Nemerov, eds. Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel A Torment (Glenstone Museum, 2018); Wye, Deborah, ed. Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books (The Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Online: www.lb.moma.org); Lorz, Julienne. Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence: The Cells (Prestel, 2015).