Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois – Humiliated by her father; security with her mother

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris on 25 December 1911. Her childhood was burdened and overshadowed by the behaviour of her domineering father who showed his daughter little love, liked to embarrass her, and mainly only thought of himself. The tyrant also had little regard for her mother, having an affair with the English nanny, from whom Louise Bourgeois learnt English at a young age. Unloved by her father, Louise found refuge with her mother who become her closest confidante and best friend, as well as in school, where the artist could escape from the unpleasant family situation. The little girl made her first attempts at sculpture at the dining table at home when she could only endure her father’s endless abuse by making replicas of her father out of breadcrumbs, which she then destroyed in a childish, helpless rage. In this seemingly endless phase of constant humiliation and degradation, the seeds were sown for Louise Bourgeois’ artistic career.

Happy wife and striving artist

Louise Bourgeois proved her great talent for drawing early on, and so had to assist in her parent’s carpet weaving business from 1923 where she grew to become an expert in feet and legs. She studied at the Sorbonne and completed her dissertation on Emmanuel Kant and Blaise Pascal. The premature death of her mother led to her attempt at suicide in 1932, but she found stability again in her art. She attended several art academies in Paris but did not achieve the hoped-for fulfilment. She paid her way by working as an art dealer, a trade she had learnt by the art historian Robert Goldwater, with whom she moved to New York in 1938. The marriage was important to her, and her husband’s profession opened a number of doors to the art world. However, despite all efforts, Bourgeois found it difficult to utilise these opportunities and remained a seeker, with her three children also limiting her artistic development at times. She studied under Vaclac Vytlacil at the New York Students League and is said to have been given the impulse to turn to sculpture by Fernand Léger. 

Art should make emotions tangible

Louise Bourgeois’ mother was a recuring theme in her artistic work. Even her key work, the over nine-meter-high spider sculpture Maman cannot be understood without knowledge of the relationship she had with her mother. The spider as a symbol of her mother stemmed from her work as a restorer of tapestries which she renewed and rewove like spiders weave their nets. The spider was a positive figure for Bourgeois, a creator and guardian. Although she explored feminism exhaustively and furnished her work with increasingly highly pronounced sexual connotations, she rejected the label of feminist artist. There is however no doubt about her role as a pioneer: Bourgeois was one of the first female artists to work with installations and despite her late discovery in the wake of a retrospective in the New York Museum of Modern art in 1982, exerted a considerable influence on numerous female artists. In her strongly autobiographical work, her primary concern was to make emotions tangible. 

Louise Bourgeois died in New York City on 31 May 2010.