Louise Bourgeois

by Frances Morris (Editor), Marie-Laure Bernadac (Contribution by), Pauo Herkenhoff (Contribution by), Rosalind Krauss (Contribution by), Julia Kristeva (Contribution by)

Overview

The most complete overview of groundbreaking artist Louise Bourgeois's sculptures, textiles, and prints is now available as an accessible paperback.

Louise Bourgeois's beguiling body of work encompasses spiders, cages, architectural sculptures, fragile human figures, and amorphous erotic forms. Strongly influenced by surrealism, abstract expressionism, and minimalism, she remains among the most prominent female contemporary artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An overview of Bourgeois's career, this book begins with a series of essays before delving into encyclopedic entries on the themes and concepts most essential to the artist's practice. A glossary of terms ranging from "etching" and "existentialism" to "Mapplethorpe" and "maternity" contains excerpts from interviews, diary entries, texts, and more than 300 illustrations to provide the reader with multiple points of entry into Bourgeois's complex and nonlinear world. The tenth-anniversary reissue makes this peerless resource available to all touched by Bourgeois's influential practice.
Her staggering variety of mediums includes rubber, wood, stone, metal, and fabric. In 1993, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. An overview of Bourgeois's career, this book covers individual works, art movements, other artists, and themes that have played an important role in her life and art, with text by acclaimed authors and critics, including Julia Kristeva, Elisabeth Lebovici, Frances Morris, Mignon Nixon, Linda Nochlin, Robert Storr, Alex Potts, Marina Warner, and Deborah Wye

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847866151
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	677,818
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 10.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who is now a professor emeritus at the University Paris Diderot.
Elisabeth Lebovici is a French art historian, journalist, and critic. Her work grapples with gender and sexuality.
Frances Morris is the director of the Tate Modern art gallery in London, succeeding Chris Dercon in January 2016.
Mignon Nixon is an American academic. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at University College London.
Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer.
Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, and former Dean of the Yale University School of Art.
Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of History of Art, University of Michigan.
Marina Sarah Warner, DBE, FRSL, FBA (born 1946) is a British novelist, short story writer, historian, and mythographer.
Deborah Wye organized a 1982 retrospective exhibition devoted to Louise Bourgeois, then 70 years old. It was the museum's first one-person survey of a woman artist in well over 30 years.

Editorial Reviews

"This A to Z glossary chronicles the intimate themes of her art and her many successes." ~Florida InsideOut

"An intriguing companion to the spectacular Louise Bourgeois retrospective...boasting some 240 illustrations, the book covers topics ranging from Anxiety to Fabric Towers to Surrealism..." ~France Magazine


“Constructed as an A-to-Z glossary of Louise Bourgeois’s life, work, philosophies, and insights, this comprehensive publication moves the reader from Maman to Mapplethorpe, primitivism to prostitution, and Sadie to surrealism, in a thought-provoking tapestry of essays, words, and images reflecting the artist’s prolific and engrossing body of work.” ~Choice Magazine

From the Publisher

French-born Bourgeois emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, yet the nearly 60 years of adventurous work in sculpture, drawing, engraving and installation reproduced here reflects an admitted attempt to repair the childhood she escaped. In 150 illustrations (50 in color), we find a haunting, enigmatic exploration of sexuality and the home: ladders that lead only to the ceiling; a giant steel spider whose egg sac is a jar of blue fluid; arrays of abstract white marble forms that simultaneously suggest male and female genitalia, often placed in enclosed, almost soothing, roomlike settings. Bernadac, curator of graphic arts at the Paris Muse National d'art Moderne, treats Bourgeois's uncanny mix of domestic comforts and erotic terrors as pointing to the ultimate imbrication of our desires into the structures we create, formal or familial. Her interpretations, while sometimes didactic and often overshadowed by the artist's own commentary, provide a welcome chronological overview of this remarkable and still evolving career. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One contributor to this retrospective asks: "How is it that an artist whose career spans some seventy years continues to appear vital and contemporary...?" Bourgeois's work, sometimes abstract and sometimes not, is sculpture or installation, may be sewn out of fabric or carved out of wood, and is ever intimate, feminist, eccentric and interesting. The difficulty of memorializing the work of such an extraordinary living artist is handled through a "glossary" of terms, a neat trick that puts "Etching" next to "Existentialism" and "Materials" next to "Maternity." This treatment pairs shorter and longer essays by art critics with excerpts from Bourgeois's diaries and interviews, providing a deep and textured sense of the artist's biography. Personally and creatively, Bourgeois was deeply affected by her mother's tolerance of her father's affair with the daughter's own tutor. Bourgeois's work doesn't follow any clear trajectory, so the episodic nature of this presentation displays her work appropriately. It can be difficult to connect a piece of text to the hundreds of reproductions of the artist's work (many in full spreads), but the overall impression is very effective-a suitable presentation for this intriguing and multifaceted artist. (Apr.)

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