Louise Bourgeois Paintings

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is celebrated today for her sculptures. Less known are the paintings she produced between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to three-dimensional media in 1949. Crucial to her artistic practice, these early works—the focus of this groundbreaking publication—show how Bourgeois evolved her deeply personal artistic lexicon, and how the themes and motifs she explored in her paintings coalesced into symbols of her sculptural practice. Informed by new archival research and the artist's extensive diaries, Louise Bourgeois: Paintings explores Bourgeois's relationship to the New York art world of the 1940s and her development of a unique pictorial language, adding a key element to our understanding of this crucial artist’s career.

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.

In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Louise Bourgeois' work defies classification, oscillating continually between abstract geometry and organic reality. She uses a range of materials from wood and plaster to marble and latex to explore universal themes-the body, childhood, maternity, and sexuality-from a deeply personal perspective, imbuing them with extraordinary emotional intensity. This comprehensive and richly illustrated monograph is chronological in approach, and brings together her works from early sketches and paintings to later sculptures and installations with which she has astonished the art world. Author Marie-Laure Bernadac skillfully weaves her insightful text with Bourgeois' own words from articles, films, and interviews to provide a unique and highly accessible study of this fascinating and complex artist.

Spirals are a recurring motif in the work of Louise Bourgeois, including her sculpture, painting, and drawings from as early as the 50s through 2010 the year of her death. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? The spiral is simultaneously "the fear of losing control" and the experience of "giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself." In another book Bourgeois is quoted as saying "The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and wring them... Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by wringing her neck. The spiral -- I love the spiral -- represents control and freedom." In materials as diverse as wood, steel, bronze, latex, marble, plaster, resin, hemp, lead, ink, pencil, crayon, woodcut, watercolor, and gouache, Bourgeois investigates every imaginable manifestation of the spiral, from graphic patterns to graphite whorls, wobbly orbits to chiseled vortices, twisted columns to coiling snakes, staircases, and pyramids. The cursive blue-paper word drawings, in English and French, complement the purely visual works by conveying the spirit of Bourgeois' poetry in extraordinary pictorial forms.

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.

Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.