Louise Bourgeois
French
Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois grew up in a household steeped in craft and tension. Her parents operated a tapestry restoration business, where the young Louise assisted by sketching missing fragments of damaged designs. This early exposure to artmaking was paired with a traumatic undercurrent: her father’s long-running affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the family’s live-in English tutor. This betrayal left a lasting emotional scar that profoundly shaped Bourgeois’s worldview and artistic voice.Though she initially studied mathematics, Bourgeois eventually shifted her focus to art. In Paris, she met American art historian Robert Goldwater, whom she married in 1938 before moving to New York. Together they raised three sons. In her early career, she concentrated on painting and printmaking, only fully embracing sculpture in the late 1940s.By the 1950s and early 1960s, Bourgeois’s output slowed as she turned inward, undergoing intensive psychoanalysis—an experience that would influence the deeply psychological nature of her later work. When she reemerged in 1964 with a solo exhibition, it featured uncanny, biomorphic plaster sculptures that marked a sharp break from her earlier, totemic wood pieces. From then on, shifting between materials, forms, and scale—oscillating between abstraction and figuration—became central to her evolving artistic language. Her recurring themes—loneliness, trauma, rage, and vulnerability—remained constant.For years, Bourgeois’s deeply personal and unorthodox work stood at odds with the prevailing art world focus on formalism. But by the 1970s and 1980s, as attention turned toward content and symbolism, her work gained recognition. In 1982, at the age of 70, she had a landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—her long-overdue breakthrough. What followed was a prolific and fearless final chapter: her monumental spider sculptures, haunting architectural “Cells,” suspended figures, and textile works crafted from her own clothing created an iconic and unsettling body of work.Throughout her life, Bourgeois drew incessantly, often late into the night, and returned frequently to printmaking. For her, art was more than expression—it was survival. As she famously said, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.” Louise Bourgeois died in New York in 2010, at the age of 98, leaving behind one of the most psychologically resonant legacies in modern art.