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).

Bourgeois, Louise (1911– ). French-American sculptor, born in Paris, where part of her training was with Léger. She married the American art historian Robert Goldwater (1907–73) in 1938 and settled in New York. Bourgeois started as a painter and engraver and turned to sculpture only in the late 1940s. She first achieved recognition in the 1950s for her wood constructions painted uniformly black or white, which preceded the similar works of Louise Nevelson. Subsequently Bourgeois has worked in various materials, including stone, metal, and latex, and she has built up a reputation as one of the leading contemporary American sculptors. Although her work is abstract, it is often suggestive of the human figure, sometimes with sexual overtones. She has continued to be active into old age and in 1993 she represented the USA at the Venice Biennale.