Louise Bourgeois Drawings

This book illustrates a collection of Louise Bourgeois' work from 1939-2005.

Award-winning creators, Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault, present a picture book biography of a beloved artist in Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, Maman, stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise’s own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois’s childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works. With a beautifully nuanced and poetic story, this book stunningly captures the relationship between mother and daughter and illuminates how memories are woven into us all. “With evocative, gorgeous illustrations and an inspirational story of an artist not often covered in children’s literature, this arresting volume is an excellent addition to nonfiction picture book collections, particularly those lacking titles about women artists.” —Booklist, starred review

Edited by Eva Keller. Essays by Robert Storr and Jean de la Fontaine.

A critical study of Louise Bourgeois's art from the 1940s to the 1980s: its departure from surrealism and its dialogue with psychoanalysis.

An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.

Her increasing recognition since then culminated with the selection of her work to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

The sculptor Louise Bourgeois is best known for her monumental abstract sculptures, one of the most striking of which is the installation Spider (1997). Too vast in scale to be viewed all at once, this elusive structure resists simple narration. It fits both no genre and all of them—architecture, sculpture, installation. Its contents and associations evoke social issues without being reducible to any one of them. Here, literary critic and theorist Mieke Bal presents the work as a theoretical object, one that can teach us how to think, speak, and write about art. Known for her commentary on the issue of temporality in art, Bal argues that art must be understood in relationship to the present time of viewing as opposed to the less-immediate contexts of what has preceded the viewing, such as the historical past of influences and art movements, biography and interpretation. In ten short chapters, or "takes," Bal demonstrates that the closer the engagement with the work of art, the more adequate the result of the analysis. She also confronts issues of biography and autobiography—key themes in Bourgeois's work—and evaluates the consequences of "ahistorical" experiences for art criticism, drawing on diverse sources such as Bernini and Benjamin, Homer and Eisenstein. This short, beautiful book offers both a theoretical model for analyzing art "out of context" and a meditation on a key work by one of the most engaging artists of our era.

The first publication to fully survey Louise Bourgeois's printmaking, a major component of her artistic practice. Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait explores the prints, books and creative process of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois whose printed oeuvre, while lesser known than other aspects of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,400 printed compositions. Over the course of her career, Bourgeois constantly revisited the themes and motifs of her art - all of which emerged from troubling emotions she struggled with for a lifetime. This investigation reveals the creative process underlying her artistic practice through evolving states for print compositions, as well as through the juxtaposition of works in different mediums and from different periods of her long career. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the book features over 250 prints organized thematically and placed within the context of the artist's sculpture, drawings and paintings. The book also sheds light on the collaborative relationships between Bourgeois and her printmaking associates who often came to her home studio to work with her there - sometimes on a daily basis - pulling trial proofs from printing presses she kept in her basement. Interviews with Bourgeois's primary assistant, with whom she worked for decades, as well as with a printer and a publisher, each of whom helped foster her creative engagement with the medium, provide insight into her working process.