Louise Bourgeois - Infinite Women

Born: 25 December 1911, France
Died: 31 May 2010
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

Emily Sullivan on Louise Bourgeois transcript

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist, best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art. Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker, and explored themes such as domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious, as well as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She considered art therapeutic, and used her work to process difficult events from her childhood. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not officially affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
With the rise of feminism in the United States, her work found a wider audience. Although she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois’s subject was usually the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso self-portrait (1963-1964), and Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the female body. In the late 1960s, her imagery became more explicitly sexual, in works such as Janus Fleuri (1968), as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. “My work deals with problems that are pre-gender,” she wrote. “For example, jealousy is not male or female.” Despite this assertion, Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard’s 1976 book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art and the sculpture became an icon of the feminist art movement.

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

A curator once described French-American artist Louise Bourgeois to me as a “fierce art grandmother to many generations of artists from around the world.” Like Webster, Bourgeois learned a love of textiles early from her mother, Josephine. Growing up, she contributed to the family tapestry business by washing, mending, sewing, and drawing. She would go on to study math and philosophy at the Sorbonne, followed by art studies with various institutions before exhibiting prints and paintings in a sectioned-off area of her family’s tapestry showroom. In the late 1930s, she married art historian Robert Goldwater, and the couple moved to New York City, where she enrolled in the Art Students League—and had three children within four years.
Connected to the art world through her husband, Bourgeois had some success in the 1940s and 1950s, such as having a piece purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 and solo shows in galleries, before returning to France with her family when her husband received a Fulbright grant.
Never one to be restricted in her expression, Bourgeois moved from painting and printmaking to working with latex, plaster, rubber, marble, and bronze, and incorporating fabrics into her sculptures. Returning to New York, she began teaching at various institutions such as the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College, and Cooper Union and hosting Sunday salons where she mentored younger artists. She was part of several exhibitions in the 1970s and ‘80s, but it wasn’t until 1982 that she had her first major exhibition, the first time MoMA dedicated a retrospective to a female artist, in no small part because other artists and curators lobbied for it. She was in her 70s and had spent 50 years making art.
Bourgeois had also moved into an old garment factory in the early 1980s, exploring different materials and creating at larger scales than she could in smaller workspaces. In 1993, she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale at the age of 81, taking her giant sculptures overseas. The mid-’90s saw another shift in her practice as she began repurposing materials from her own closet, incorporating a lifetime’s worth of clothing into her work and coming full circle to her earliest roots: textiles. She continued making art into her 90s and lived to 98, her legacy securely having cemented her in 20th century art history. Long after her death, her work continues to be exhibited internationally; in 2023, the Art Gallery of New South Wales staged a massive retrospective of her work with more than 150 pieces—one of, if not the largest exhibition dedicated to a single woman artist in the country’s history to that point.