Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois boorzhwä´ , 1911-, French-American sculptor, b. Paris. She married the art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938, emigrated to the United States, and became a citizen. Her semiabstract sculpture employs many media, including wood, stone, plaster, metal, and latex, and has since the 1980s included installations encompassing room-sized environments. Characterized by organic forms, her sculpture is extremely personal, sensual, and symbolic, often dealing with female identity and sexuality. She has also created a variety of paintings, drawings, prints, and, beginning in the 1990s, textile works. In addition, she is known for her highly personal and often autobiographical writings. Virtually ignored for decades, Bourgeois was finally recognized in the 1980s and 90s and has influenced many women artists. Her work is in various museum collections, e.g., New York's Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, which held a 1982 retrospective of her work, as did the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2001.

Bibliography: See her Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997 (1998); studies by D. Wye (1982), P. Gardner (1994), C. Kotik (1994), P. Weiermair et al. (1995), J. Helfenstein (2002), M.-L. Bernadac et al. (2003), and E. Keller, ed. (2004); B. Cornand, dir., The Whisper of the Whistling Water (documentary film, 2004).



Author not available, BOURGEOIS, LOUISE., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008