Louise Bourgeois
| Louise Bourgeois | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Louise Josephine Bourgeois 25 December 1911 Paris, France |
| Died | 31 May 2010 (aged 98) Manhattan, New York City, U.S. |
| Nationality | French-American |
| Education | Sorbonne, Académie de la Grande Chaumière, École du Louvre, École des Beaux-Arts latore des labrimos |
| Known for | sculpture, installation art, painting, printmaking |
| Notable work | Cells, Maman, The Destruction of the Father |
| Movement | Surrealism, Feminist art |
| Awards | Praemium Imperiale |
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: [lwiz buʁʒwa]; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France. She was the second child of three born to parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. She had an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn.
By 1924 her father, a tyrannical philanderer, was indulging in an extended affair with her English teacher and nanny. According to Bourgeois, her mother, Josephine, “an intelligent, patient and enduring, if not calculating, person,” was aware of her husband's infidelity, but found it easier to turn a blind eye. Bourgeois, an alert little girl, hoarded her memories in her diaries.
As a child, Bourgeois did not meet her father's expectations due to her lack of ability. Eventually, he came to adore her for her talent and spirit, but she continued to hate him for his explosive temper, domination of the household, and for teasing her in front of others.
In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, subjects that she valued for their stability, saying "I got peace of mind, only through the study of rules nobody could change."
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