We invite you to get acquainted with one of the most interesting masters of the 20th century - Louise Bourgeois. Her biography and creativity are presented in this article. L. Bourgeois is an American sculptor, graphic artist and painter of French origin. Louise is an artist who mythologized his nightmares and obsessions, as well as the facts of his childhood. There was no real upheaval in her adult life, but Bourgeois did not stop nurturing her mental trauma, which had tormented her from an early age.
Childhood and Drama Louise
Louise was born in 1911 in Paris. Bourgeois childhood passed in Aubusson, a French province. Here her family owned a trellis restoration workshop. As a teenager, Louise was given to the Lyceum of Fenellona - a prestigious educational institution. The girl was very close with her mother, Josephine. Louise often helped Josephine in her work: she drew, sewed, and repaired tapestries.
Relations between parents with external prosperity were far from ideal. Father Louise almost openly cheated on his wife with an Englishwoman - the governess of their children. For a little girl, this banal situation became a real drama. She experienced it all her life, and also rethought in creativity. Louise considered her father a traitor. She even attempted suicide after her mother died.
University studies and private lessons
Louise Bourgeois in 1932 entered the Sorbonne. Here she studied philosophy, geometry and mathematics. In the same year, Bourgeois visited the USSR. Since 1936, Louise became involved in art studios and schools in Paris. She visited the workshop of Konstantin Brancusi, the great sculptor, who at that time was a cult figure of the local avant-garde. Louise took lessons from Fernand Leger, the illustrious cubist. He appreciated her talent and encouraged the girl to do sculpture.
Marriage and death of a spouse
An important event in Louise’s personal life took place in 1938, when she married Robert Goldwater, an American art critic and Harvard graduate. After the wedding, the young moved to New York. Here, the husband of Bourgeois began working at the Museum of Primitive Art (he was appointed its first director). An exemplary union of loving creative people lasted until 1974, when the husband of Louise died. She bore him three sons.
Painting and Graphics Louise
At the beginning of her creative career, the bourgeois was engaged in painting and graphics. In a series of works by Femme Maison, created in 1945-1947, and Fallen Women (1946-1947), the artist used the technique of surrealists. She fused together various objects: structures similar to houses, and a female body. These works are Louise's reflection on what role a woman plays in the family. Many define this role solely as care for the hearth. However, Bourgeois herself claims that her work is a parody of surrealism, which tried to represent a woman in the form of a construction.
Appeal to sculpture
Louise focused on sculpture in the 1940s. In it, she is considered one of the best masters of the 20th century. In the first plastic experiments, Louise noticeably influenced the archaic ancient Greek, ancient American and African sculptures. They trace the influence of such major masters of the last century as Henry Moore, Konstantin Barnkusi and Alberto Giacometti, who also relied on archaic plastic in their works. The bourgeois sculptures initially consisted of groups of organic and abstract forms, which were often made of wood.
"Blind, leading the blind"
"The Blind, Leading the Blind", created in 1947, is one of the most famous works of Louise Bourgeois. It can be considered a direct roll call with “The Parable of the Blind” by Peter Brueghel the Elder. Louise's work is a construction consisting of 20 long pink wooden pillars, tapering downward, and at the top connected by a screed-bridge. The simplicity of this sculpture discourages, and the feeling of insecurity and instability captures. The bourgeois states that this work is simply a reminiscence of the child’s desire to hide under the table when dinner scandals occur in the family.
New materials
In the 1960s, materials such as stone, bronze and latex began to be used in Louise's sculptures. After visiting Italy, marble was added to them. In 1949, sculptures of Bourgeois were first exhibited in New York, at the Peridot Gallery.
Interest in the dark side and sexuality
Louise is a post-surrealist artist who made a name for himself in the 1930s and 1940s. At this time, the French surrealist movement was already in decline. The artists belonging to him never created close-knit groups. They were not inclined to manifestos, broadcast programs and declarative statements. For the first time, a group was distinguished among these masters that differed not only in their interest in the "dark side" of intellectual and mental life, typical of romantics, but also in the body, which was a manifestation of the "dark side". That is why sexuality for Louise is associated with trauma, as well as with the painful search for their own identity, role in the relationship between the sexes. In 1968, Bourgeois introduced 2 sculptures that are both shocking and ironic: Blooming Janus and Girl.
"Girl"
This is a latex-made giant phallus swinging on a butcher’s hook. This sculpture reflects the critical view of Louise Bourgeois on the iconography of the phallus, as well as the male status associated with it . The base of the sculpture can be read both as male testes, and as a female breast, and as rounded hips of a woman, limiting the crotch.
"Blooming Janus"
"Blooming Janus" is a work that reflects a combination of gender forms flowing one into another. In Latin, "Janus" means "passage", "arch". However, it is at the same time a two-faced god, with one face turned to the past, and the other looking to the future, to janua - the divine gates opened in peacetime and closed during wars. The rigid and monolithic basis of the sculpture is an image of two flaccid penises, which are connected to a central element, which is almost shapeless, resembling pubic hair and the sex gap. The adjective "flowering" refers to the metaphor of the genitals as a fragrance and flowering. Feminine and masculine merged together, like two faces. Two penises are similar at the same time to female buttocks, hips and breasts.
"Destruction of the Father"
Louise Bourgeois completed her first installation in 1974. She opened a new stage in the creative biography of the master. In the work of Bourgeois "Destruction of the Father", the sculptor realizes in complex plastic form painful memories and instincts that live in the subconscious, which are caused by conflict with the father, which has been weighed on the author since childhood. Installation is a cave-like structure. Shapes resembling stones surround a sacrificial plate with body parts scattered on it, including pieces of real lamb that were bought in a butcher's shop.
This work of Louise is very alarming, reminiscent of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who was very much appreciated by Bourgeois.
Cell Period
In the 1990s, Louise Bourgeois continues to work actively. Her creativity moves to a new stage - the period of the "cell". The artist considered one of her goals to be creating an environment that would be self-sufficient, independent of the museum environment. You can enter this environment. These designs are a kind of isolation of experience gained in the past. Cell (Choisy) - the cell in which the marble sculpture of the house is located. Above it is a large guillotine. This sculpture resembles an episode from a nightmare.
Couple iv
The works of Louise Bourgeois of a later period include a number of goals, as well as figures made of fabric. They depict varying degrees of despair and pain. For example, the 1997 work of Couple IV is something reminiscent of an old-fashioned display from a museum. Two rag-shaped figures without heads are visible on it, trying to make love.
"Spider"
The installation "Spider" Louise Bourgeois (photo below) has become a symbol of the late work of this sculptor. It presents a model of perfect expressive and rational design, created by nature. In the symbolic dictionary of Bourgeois, Louise the spider does not carry any negative meaning. Louise associates it with his mother, smart, balanced, reasonable, patient, insightful, sophisticated, useful, irreplaceable and neat, like a spider. This insect is associated with the industriousness of the parent, as well as with the skillful skill of the weaver. One of the works on this subject, created by Louise, is called - "Mom." The plastic monumental form made of bronze, its laconicism and geometric simplicity demonstrate the feeling of harmonic balance inherent in the art of Bourgeois.
First big exhibition
In 2000, the first large exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, entitled "I do, I destroy, I remodel," was held at the famous London Tate Modern gallery. It was she who declared the State National Museum to exist. Louise became the first sculptor, whose works were placed in the new bastion of modern art. The success of the exhibition was huge, and the choice of the master was by no means accidental, since the work of Bourgeois in its essence is an anthology of contemporary art.
Exhibition "Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Being: Cells"
In 2015, the Garage Museum of Modern Art presented a large-scale exhibition of the Bourgeois in Moscow. This exhibition is dedicated to a series of environmental sculptures that Louise created over the last 20 years of her life. It presented more than 80 works of the Bourgeois: installations, early sculptures, drawings and paintings that preceded the innovative cycle of works.
Louise Bourgeois, whose work is recognized worldwide, has lived a long life. She died of a heart attack at the age of 98 in New York on May 31, 2010.