Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois is widely considered to have been one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. In a career spanning seventy years, she produced an intensely personal body of work that is as complex as it is diverse. She created sculptures in a wide range of media: unique environments, or ‘cells’, in which she combined traditional marble and bronze sculptures alongside the everyday objects imbued with a strong emotional charge; prints and drawings; and hand-stitched works made of fabric.

Bourgeois originally studied mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne but switched to art in 1932. She moved to New York in 1938 upon her marriage to the American art historian, Robert Goldwater. Although she continued her artistic practice in America, her career evolved slowly. The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of her work in 1982, when she was seventy, marked a turning point. In an interview that coincided with the opening, Bourgeois explained that the imagery in her work, which deals with themes such as jealousy, violence, sexual desire, betrayal, fear, anxiety and loneliness, was wholly autobiographical and a form of catharsis. In 2000, she made the first sculpture in what would become an iconic series of giant spiders entitled Maman. She continued to work obsessively up until her death in 2010, aged ninety-eight.

Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris and passed away in 2010 in New York. Her work is exhibited widely internationally and continues to inspire a rich body of academic and critical commentary. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has established an online digital catalogue raisonné of the 35,000 prints and illustrated books that she produced during her lifetime.