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