Perhaps the most iconic image of Louise Bourgeois holding ‘Fillette’, one of her more provocative sculptures.
Louise Bourgeois once described herself as “a woman without secrets,” and she obsessively mined her personal life and her own psyche to find inspiration for her remarkable artworks. She relentlessly experimented with different media, and although she only achieved fame later on in life, she is now regarded as an icon of 20th and 21st century art.
Bourgeois is mostly known for her large sculptures and installation art, but she experimented with a huge range of materials and techniques throughout her career, and she was an especially prolific printmaker. Indeed, her prints now account for 54% of her work sold at auction, where the majority of them fetch between £1,000 and £5,000.
For Bourgeois, creating art was a therapeutic process that allowed her to work through complex issues in her past and her personal life. As such, it is helpful to know a little about the artist in order to truly understand her work. Below are seven things you might not have known about Louise Bourgeois.
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She Lived For Almost A Century
Louise Bourgeois was born on Christmas Day 1911, and she died of heart failure aged 98 on 31 May 2010. Even leaving aside the art she produced during her life, it’s extraordinary to think she lived through most of the seismic events of the 20th century, including two world wars, women getting the vote, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the invention of the internet. Bourgeois was, undeniably, a force of nature, and her constant willingness to learn, experiment, and adapt are undoubtedly reasons she is now widely regarded as an icon of contemporary art.
Her Most Expensive Prints Sold For Nearly £300,000
He Disappeared into Complete Silence is an illustrated book that was first published in 1947. It consists of parables written by Louise Bourgeois and accompanied by a series of black and white engravings, inspired by New York’s skyscrapers. The artist’s aim in publishing the book was to increase her own fame in the United States, though this was unsuccessful, and the book remained relatively unknown until Bourgeois became famous later in her life.
He Disappeared into Complete Silence Sold by Christie’s in 2018
She Started Studying Mathematics And Philosophy
Bourgeois initially enrolled in the prestigious Sorbonne to study mathematics and philosophy. She later stated that she enjoyed the peace and the certainty provided by figures and geometric shapes, and it’s interesting to note these shapes and principles informed much of her work throughout her life, including prints such as Untitled (2002) and What is the Shape of this Problem?
Bourgeois only switched to studying art after her mother died in 1932, later saying that she was drawn by “the certainties of feeling”. The decision brought her into the orbit of certain famous artists such as Fernand Léger, who was purportedly the one to tell her she was a sculptor, rather than a painter.
She Worked At Her Parents’ Tapestry Restoration Shop
The Bourgeois family owned a tapestry restoration workshop, where they would revive antique tapestries before selling them in their Parisian gallery. The young Louise Bourgeois began helping by drawing and filling in sections of the designs that had become worn and needed restitching.
As an adult, she said: “I became an expert at drawing legs and feet… That is how my art started.” Indeed, her relationship with fabric continued long past her childhood; for much of her adult life, she worked in sculpture, painting, and prints, but in the last two decades of her career, she began experimenting widely with fabric. Now, some of her fabric-based art is highly sought after, including Untitled (2002), a serigraph which was sold by Galerie Kornfeld Auktionen in September 2021 for £54,841.
The Good Mother by Louise Bourgeois
She Used Art As Therapy
Louise Bourgeois often described her art as a means of survival, and the idea crops up time and again in her pieces, including in What is the Shape of this Problem? where she wrote: “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”
One of the themes Bourgeois returned to and explored frequently was her troubled childhood. Growing up, she had a difficult relationship with her father, and this was compounded when she discovered as a young girl that her English governess had also become her father’s mistress. Bourgeois consistently returned to this betrayal; much of her work explores familial relationships, focusing in particular on the figure of the father and the mother. For instance, Hang On!! revolves around the cycle of birth, life, and death, and the mother is a prominent figure within it.
She Made America Her Home
Though Bourgeois was born in Paris and spent her formative years in France, she spent most of her life in America. Bourgeois met her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, in a print shop she ran in Paris. As she later said: “In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married.”
After the marriage, the couple sailed back to Goldwater’s native New York, where they both lived and worked for the rest of their lives. Bourgeois apparently once said she was “an American artist, not a French one,” and she gained US citizenship in 1955.
She Worked Until The End
Louise Bourgeois survived her husband by 37 years, and she lived until the grand age of 98, only achieving fame in later life. According to her studio manager, she worked right up until the week before she died, which seems fitting, given it was her relentless work ethic and desire to continue experimenting which finally secured her a place as one of the most important artists of the past century.
