Fembio Special: Women Artists - an Exhibition by Almut Nitzsche and FemBio e.V
Louise Bourgeois
(Louise Joséphine Bourgeois)
born December 25, 1911 in Paris
died May 31, 2010 in New York City
French-Us-American sculptor
15th anniversary of death December 25, 2025
Biography
A petite old lady in a shaggy fur coat, her narrow face streaked with fine wrinkles, a malicious smile on her lips - that is Louise Bourgeois at age 70 in the iconic portrait photo that Robert Mapplethorpe took of her in 1982. The scandalous twist: the old lady is carrying a giant 24-inch phallus with bulging testicles and a somewhat shriveled tip under her arm. Fillette (Little Girl) is what the sculptor called this 1968 work hanging it high above the heads of exhibition visitors. Fillette is typical of one of the central tendencies in Louise Bourgeois' work: her provocative but also witty exploration of sexuality. “My demons are in my work,” said Louise Bourgeois, referring to her childhood full of fears, threats and injuries as the source of all her creative impulses.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris more than a hundred years ago. Her parents ran a thriving restoration workshop for old tapestries in Choisy-le-Roi and later in Antony near Paris, employing over 20 people. Louise was allowed to help out in the workshop from an early age, but also received a solid education at the renowned Lycée Fénélon in Paris. She regularly spent the winter months with her mother and siblings (Henriette, six years her senior, and her brother Pierre, born a year after her) on the Côte d'Azur, where the children attended the international school and their mother received treatment for her lung condition. So much for the façade behind which Louise's “dramas” played out.
As a girl, she didn't feel appreciated by her charming but unreliable father, whose extramarital affairs fascinated and disgusted her in equal measure. When she was ten, Sadie, an English student, came to live in their house, ostensibly to teach the children English, but in fact she was her father's mistress. Louise suffered from the double betrayal and felt for her mother who was forced to endure this ménage à trois for the next ten years. In 1932, her mother died and Louise attempted suicide, which her father thwarted. In the same year, she enrolled at various private art schools in Paris. Her first works were surrealist drawings, etchings and paintings until one of her teachers, Fernand Léger, discovered her talent as a sculptor.
In 1938, at the age of 27, she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian. They adopted a French orphan, Michel, and moved to New York together, where Bourgeois gave birth to two more sons, Jean-Louis in 1940 and Alain in 1941. On the roof of her house is where she began to work on her first sculptures - totemic whitewashed wooden steles to which she added a few cuts with her knife to suggest human forms. Arranged in pairs, groups and individual figures, these personnages symbolized her memories of the people she left behind in France.
At the end of the 1950s, there was a radical change in her choice of materials and themes. At a time when American art was characterized by abstract painting and by art using imagery from popular and mass culture (Pop art), Bourgeois ensured a return to organic forms and the human body: she used plaster and latex to create spiral or cave-shaped places of retreat as well as a large series of body parts - sleeping phalli, landscapes formed out of breasts, double-sexed sexual organs (Janus). From 1967 she traveled regularly to Italy, where she worked in marble quarries and foundries. She created small archaic female figures, mysterious animal creatures in polished bronze and turned perfectly worked blocks of marble into huge, eerie pairs of eyes.
Robert Goldwater died in 1973 and Bourgeois processed her grief in a confrontation with the past. She called her first large spatial installation The Destruction of the Father - a cave bathed in red light with animal carcass shaped latex forms, the gruesome remains of a cannibalistic orgy. Many such environments (Cells) followed, rooms made from old wooden doors or iron grids, in which she used mirrors, glass and metal objects, pieces of furniture, old lonely-looking children's clothes to depict “different kinds of pain”.
For decades, Bourgeois' work was mainly known to insiders. It was not until 1982 that the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a major retrospective to her work - the public discovered an artist in her seventies with extraordinary visual powers. More recognition was to follow: In the 1990s she participated in Documenta 9 and the Venice Biennale and had her first major solo exhibitions in European museums. Her late fame made little difference to her life - she continued to work in her New York studio, giving caustic interviews (”…never - never! - do I succeed in making people understand what I mean”) and battling with her demons. She created monumental, up to 30 feet tall bronze spider sculptures (Maman) and, in the last years of her life, Pairs - naked rag dolls covered with pink tricot fabric, their hands and legs sewn together in an inescapable embrace.
(Text from 2011, translated in 2024 by Gabriele Koch with the help of DeepL.com
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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