Book Description

Still working at the age of 91, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century. This comprehensive study of Bourgeois’ work in marble includes pieces from the 1960s to the present, and offers the artist’s own reflections on the medium and its importance to her oeuvre.

In her seventy-year career Louise Bourgeois has worked in a wide variety of mediums, including latex, wood, plaster, and metal. Yet she returns again and again to marble, a material she "can wrestle with." As this volume reveals, the major themes of Bourgeois’ art—childhood, family, the body, sexuality, and innocence—are enhanced by the flesh-like tones and smooth, unforgiving surface. Oscillating continually between abstract figures and organic form, Bourgeois manages to imbue this inert material with extraordinary emotional intensity, from her mysterious and dramatic large-scale "cell" installations to her seductive and feminine "nature studies." ... Read more

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One of this century's preeminent artists, Louise Bourgeois recently was the subject of a major one-person exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and she represented the United States in the 1993 Venice Biennale. This exquisitely designed volume, which includes 133 color reproductions, is a testimony to the importance of the act of drawing to this highly autobiographical artist, who is known primarily for her sculptures.Produced over the course of 50 years, the drawings are seen side by side with Bourgeois' own observations about her personal life, her work, and the genesis and sources of certain works, offering a very intimate vision of Bourgeois as a woman and as an artist, as well as insight into the creative act of making art. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A glimpse into the mind of a great artist...
Browsing through this book of sketches is like reading Bourgeois' personal diary. These drawings seem to be the ones she made only for herself, to figure things out and generate more ideas. This is not her "finished" work, so don't expect "LB's Greatest Hits", but any true fan of this artist will delight in seeing her sketchbooks come to life and reading her thoughts and memories of the drawings. Full of rich spontaneity & wit. ... Read more

Book Description

American sculptor, painter and printmaker, born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois is an exceptional figure in the contemporary art world. Her career spans some seventy years and touches upon such key moments as Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and feminism. After a lifetime of little artistic recognition, Bourgeois now enjoys cult status.

An extraordinarily influential sculptor, she has worked, often experimentally, with a huge variety

of materials. She is equally admired for her intimate drawings, often combining fragments of text, and her highly personal writings, which often address her long and complex life story. Themes such as the Other, the feminine and the masculine, and the body - as well as her own specific biography - spin a tangled and intense life-long body of work of unusual profundity. ... Read more

Book Description

edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist


"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor."

Since the age of twelve, the internationally renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois has been writing and drawing--first a diary precisely recounting the everyday events of her family life, then notes and reflections. Destruction of the Father--the title comes from the name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in 1973--contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images.

Writing is a means of expression that has gained increasing importance for Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing is compulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by her intellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense of literary form (she has frequently published articles on artists, exhibitions, and art events). Bourgeois, a private woman "without secrets," has given numerous interviews to journalists, artists, and writers, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hidden meanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumas of her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative process. ... Read more

Book Description

Born in Paris in 1911 and a New Yorker since 1938, Louise Bourgeois created a unique oeuvre that owes no allegiance to 20th-century "isms" in the course of a career than has spanned more than 60 years. Her art is grounded in her own life and experience: "My goal is to re-experience a past emotion...to relive anxiety...anxiety is a passive state, and the object is to be active and take control." Yet Louise Bourgeois did not create an autonomous universe as an artistic hermit. While her art is nourished by personal experience, it also draws from art and art history--a wellspring of inspiration from which she developed her themes, concepts, and approach to media in both two- and three-dimensional works. Her rich and fascinating oeuvre is the subject of this publication, which presents more than 50 works from 60 years of creative activity in impressive full-color illustrations. Most of the works featured here are from the Daros Collection in Zurich. Edited by Eva Keller.

Essays by Robert Storr and Jean de la Fontaine. Clothbound, 9.5 x 11.75 in. / 144 pgs / 65 color. ... Read more

Book Description

Notwithstanding their considerable differences and individuality--one would hardly expect them to have a lover in common--Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon share an artistic intent to explore eroticism and sexuality. Each artist deals, in his or her own stylistic way, with the intense physical states of ecstasy, passion, conflict and fear. Working through the medium of drawing--the "medium of the mind"--they trace themselves, scribing pictorial metaphors of an alternately tender, aggressive, attached, forceful and even erotic confrontation with the material. Creativity, itself never free from conflict, undresses itself in drawings that touch on obsession, desire and the pleasures of eroticism. (In Search of) The Perfect Lover groups together extensive works on paper from the Hauser and Wirth Collections, complemented by a selection of sculptures. Accompanying texts embrace the connections between body, eroticism, sexuality and creativity, as well as the potential conflicts embedded in each artist's work. Edited by Matthias Winzen and Michaela Unterdörfer. Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.75 in./224 pgs / 152 color 10 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20054 ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A must have book for those who love Bourgeois
This is a gem. A distillation of Bourgeois' philosophy and work which is essential reading for any artist today. All of the books in this series on Women Artists are wonderful. They get right to the point of the work and words of each artist not underestimating the importance of each in her time. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Louise Bourgeois
If you are a fan of Bourgeois's (early) sculpture, you will definitely enjoy this book! The one drawback with this catalogue is that it was published in 1995 and doesn't show any of her recent work. (Since 1995, louise Bourgeois has produced some great pieces: sculpture, installations, drawing and prints.) If you are not yet familiar with Bourgeois Oeuvre, look at a recently published catalogue in order to get a complete overview of her work. ... Read more

Book Description

The art of Louise Bourgeois stages a dynamic encounter between modern art and psychoanalysis, argues Mignon Nixon in the first full-scale critical study of the artist's work. A pivotal figure in twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, France) emigrated to New York in 1938 and is still actively working and exhibiting today. From Bourgeois's formative struggle with the "father figures" of surrealism, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to her galvanizing role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, to her subsequent emergence as a leading voice in postmodernism, this book explores the artist's responses to war, dislocation, and motherhood, to the predicament of the "woman artist" and the politics of sexual and social liberation, as a dialogue with psychoanalysis.

Convinced that she could express "deeper things in three dimensions," Bourgeois abandoned painting for sculpture in the 1940s, founding her art in one of the twentieth century's most radical and controversial accounts of subjectivity, the object relations psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein. Rejecting the Oedipal narratives of Freud and the dream imagery of surrealism for the object world of the infantile drives, Bourgeois turned to the child analysis pioneered by Klein, the figure Julia Kristeva has called "the boldest reformer in the history of modern psychoanalysis." With Klein, Bourgeois thinks the negative -- fragmentation, splitting, and formlessness -- where we might least expect to find it, in the corporeal fantasies of mother and child. This turn to the mother and the death drive at once in child psychoanalysis, Nixon contends, not only finds powerful expression in Bourgeois's art, but is echoed in the work of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, and Eva Hesse, and in a return to Klein in recent art.

"Fantastic reality," Bourgeois calls the condition of her art. Starting from Bourgeois's investigation, through a multiplicity of forms and materials, of the problem of subjectivity on the very threshold of emergence, this book argues for a new psychoanalytic story of modern art. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells is both a catalog of works by and a biography of the famous Parisian artist. Born in 1911, the now-octogenarian Bourgeois has shown widely throughout the world and to great critical acclaim, especially within the last decade. Bourgeois's personal history is vastly important in the content of her work, and this book takes readers on a journey from her affluent childhood in France, including family photographs, to her schooling under painter Fernand Léger to her eventual marriage and move to the United States, where she continued her long and varied career working primarily as a sculptor and installation artist.

Bourgeois's abstract figurative sculptures range in materials from plaster, marble, and bronze to the more nontraditional latex, glass, thread, etc. Regardless of the medium, the work is imbued with a strong physicality that echoes the forms of the human body. Included in the book are discussions of Bourgeois's work in relation to other artists and movements such as Rodin, Brancusi, and primitivism. Bourgeois has been an inspiration to an entire generation of artists, not just because of her long and illustrious career but because her work has pushed so many boundaries. Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells is an informative and beautiful book with 77 color and 176 black-and-white images. --Jennifer Cohen ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Beautiful representation of an amazing body of work
Of the many Bourgeois books I've seen this has the best illustrations of some of her most compelling work. Most publishers have focused more on her history and little on her current work. Installation work really must be seen to be experienced but the photography of this book captures the colors and emotions held within each cell. I highly recomend it. ... Read more

Book Description

Louise Bourgeois first travelled to Russia in 1932, at the age of 21, having just received her Baccalaureate in philosophy from the University of Paris. Her second journey occured in the spring of 1934, and included a visit to the Moscow Theater Festival, to see the work of the Russian Constructivists, and to observe May Day celebrations in Red Square. Nearly 70 years later, Bourgeois returned to Russia on the occasion of her retrospective at the State Hermitage Museum, the first major exhibition of a living American artist to be held at that institution. From the teetering personages of the late 1940s, which represent the members of the family she left behind in France, to the great steel protectress Maman, created in 2001 especially for the Hermitage courtyard, Bourgeois' indomitable will, psychological complexity, and brash, bold personality show through in the sculptures and drawings illustrated here.

Essays by Sofia Kudriatseva and Julie Sylvester.
Foreword by Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky.

Red velvet clothbound, 12 x 15 in., 104 pages, 35 color and 16 b&w

Publisher: Hermitage Projects ... Read more

Book Description

Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she has committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs inspiring her work. "The Insomnia Drawings" show the artist's mind at work: drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the hustle-bustle of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman's life and work: beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor. As soon as the artist agreed to entrust "The Insomnia Drawings" to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Louise Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places "The Insomnia Drawings" in context of Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois' imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. Furthermore, the second volume offers a chronology and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. This landmark publication is a must for everyone wanting to take part in the imaginative journeys of one of today's most important artists. "The Insomnia Drawings" are part of the Daros Collection. 13 x 10.25 inches, 220 illustrations.

Author Quotes:
"She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while here sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions-between plentitude and lack, proximity and absence, agreement and contradiction."-Elisabeth Bronfen

"L'art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / unafraid: Art / est le / contraire / du acting. Les paysages de nuit on / envahi les jours. Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it can be worse / / M is for mother / in the water / it is subject / to change / or even to reversal."-Louise Bourgeois ... Read more

Book Description

Complex and highly idiosyncratic, the work of Louise Bourgeois enthralls audiences throughout the world. Beginning in the 1940s, shortly after arriving in New York City, Bourgeois produced her first mature, highly original paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

While most of her contemporaries were drawn toward pure abstraction, the work of Louise Bourgeois entered the realm of the psychological and symbolic. Themes already evident in these early works continued to resonate throughout her career. The Personages represent her first explorations in sculpture; summoning a physical presence, they suggest moments of alienation as well as evocative encounters.

This comprehensive catalogue features the artistís work from the 1940s and 1950s, including 25 sculptures, 17 paintings, 30 drawings, and the series of prints inspired by New Yorkís landscape of skyscrapers, ìHe Disappeared into Complete Silence,î which presents Bourgeoisí own hermetic texts juxtaposed with enigmatic pictures. An essay explicates the role of ritual and representation in the work of Louise Bourgeois and includes rare documentary photos. ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Women's Review of Books, published by Women's Review of Books on November 1, 2003. The length of the article is 2171 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Art and autobiography: three books examine the career of artist Louise Bourgeois.(Book Review)
Author: Patrcia G. Berman
Publication: The Women's Review of Books (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2003
Publisher: Women's Review of Books
Volume: 21Issue: 2Page: 1(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Etc. Montreal, published by Revue d'Art Contemporain Etc. Inc. on March 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1932 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Louise Bourgeois: le regard du corps.
Author: Therese St Gelais
Publication: Etc. Montreal (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2002
Publisher: Revue d'Art Contemporain Etc. Inc.
Issue: 57Page: 12-15

Distributed by Thompson Gale ... Read more