Louise Bourgeois: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

We invite you to meet one of the most interesting masters of the 20th century - Louise Bourgeois. Her biography and work are presented in this article. L. Bourgeois is an American sculptor, graphic artist and painter of French origin. Louise is an artist who has mythologised her nightmares and obsessions, as well as the facts of her childhood. There were no real upheavals in her adult life, but Bourgeois did not stop nurturing her mental trauma, which tormented her from an early age.

Childhood and drama Louise

Louise was born in 1911 in Paris. Bourgeois spent his childhood in Aubusson, a French province. Here her family owned a tapestry restoration workshop. As a teenager, Louise was sent to the Fenellon Lyceum, a prestigious educational institution. The girl was very close to her mother, Josephine. Louise often helped Josephine in her work: she painted, sewed, repaired tapestries.

Relations between parents with outward well-being were far from ideal. Father Louise almost openly cheated on his wife with an English governess of their children. For a little girl, this banal situation has become a real drama. She experienced it all her life, and alsorethought in creativity. Louise considered her father a traitor. She even attempted suicide after her mother's death.

University and private lessons

Louise Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne in 1932. Here she studied philosophy, geometry and mathematics. In the same year, Bourgeois visited the USSR. Since 1936, Louise began to study in art studios and schools in Paris. She also visited the workshop of Constantin Brancusi, the great sculptor, who at that time was a cult figure of the local avant-garde. Louise took lessons from Fernand Léger, the celebrated Cubist. He appreciated her talent and encouraged the girl to take up sculpture.

Marriage and death of spouse

An important event in Louise's personal life took place in 1938, when she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian and Harvard graduate. After the wedding, the young moved to New York. Here Bourgeois's husband began to work at the Museum of Primitive Art (he was appointed its first director). The exemplary union of creative people who love each other lasted until 1974, when her husband Louise died. She bore him three sons.

Painting and graphics Louise

Bourgeois at the beginning of her creative career was engaged in painting and graphics. In the series of works Femme Maison, created in 1945-1947, and Fallen Women (1946-1947), the artist used the technique of the surrealists. She fused together different objects: structures that looked like houses, and the female body. These works are Louise's reflections on the role played bywoman in the family. Many define this role solely as taking care of the hearth. However, Bourgeois herself claims that her work is a parody of surrealism, which tried to present a woman as a construct.

Appeal to sculpture

Louise focused her attention 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 notices the influence of archaic ancient Greek, ancient American and African sculpture. They trace the influence of such major masters of the last century as Henry Moore, Constantine Barncusi and Alberto Giacometti, who also relied on archaic plastic in their works. Bourgeois's sculptures initially consisted of groups of organic and abstract forms, often made of wood.

The 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 echo of the Parable of the Blind by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The work of Louise is a construction consisting of 20 long pink wooden supports, tapering downwards, and connected at the top with a screed-bridge. The simplicity of this sculpture is discouraging, and the feeling of insecurity and instability is captivating. Bourgeois claims that this work is simply a reminiscence of a child's desire to hide under the table when dinner scandals occur in the family.

New materials

In the 1960s Louise began to use materials such aslike stone, bronze and latex. After visiting Italy, marble was added to them. In 1949, the sculptures of Bourgeois were exhibited for the first time - in New York, at the Peridot Gallery.

Interest in the "dark side" and sexuality

Louise is a post-surrealist artist who made his name in the 1930s and 1940s. At this time, the French surrealist movement was already in decline. Artists related to him never formed close-knit groups. They were not inclined towards manifestos, broadcast programs and declarative statements. At first, a group stood out among these masters, which was not only interested in the "dark side" of intellectual and mental life, characteristic of the 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 her own identity, a role in relations between the sexes. In 1968, Bourgeois presented 2 sculptures that are both shocking and ironic: Blooming Janus and Girl.

Girl

This is a giant phallus made of latex, 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 as the male testicles, the female breast, and the woman's rounded thighs that bound the crotch.

Blooming Janus

"Blossoming Janus" is a work that reflectscombination of gender forms flowing one into another. In Latin "Janus" means "passage", "arch". However, this is at the same time a two-faced god, whose one face is turned to the past, and the other looks to the future, to janua - the divine gates, open in peacetime and closed during wars. The rigid and monolithic base of the sculpture is an image of two flaccid penises, which are connected to a central element, almost shapeless, reminiscent of pubic hair and a genital slit. The adjective "blooming" refers to the metaphor of the genitals as fragrance and flowering. Feminine and masculine merged into one, like two faces. Two penises at the same time look like a woman's buttocks, thighs and breasts.

Destruction of the Father

Louise Bourgeois made her first installation in 1974. She opened a new stage in the creative biography of the master. In the work of Bourgeois "The Destruction of the Father" the sculptor realizes in a complex plastic form painful memories and instincts that live in the subconscious, which are caused by a conflict relationship with his father, which has weighed on the author since childhood. The installation is a cave-like structure. Stone-like figures surround a sacrificial slab with body parts scattered on it, including pieces of real lamb that were bought at a butcher shop.

This work of Louise is very disturbing, reminiscent of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who was greatly appreciated by Bourgeois.

Period"cells"

In the 1990s, Louise Bourgeois continued to work actively. Her creativity is moving on to a new stage - the period of the "cell". The artist considered one of her goals the creation of an environment that would be self-sufficient, independent of the museum environment. This environment can be entered. These constructions are a kind of isolation of the experience gained in the past. Cell (Choisy) - a cell in which there is a marble sculpture of the house. Above it is a large guillotine. This sculpture resembles an episode from a nightmare.

Couple IV

Louise Bourgeois's later work includes a number of heads as well as cloth figures. They depict varying degrees of despair and pain. For example, the 1997 work Couple IV is something reminiscent of an old-fashioned display from a museum. It shows two headless rag figures attempting to make love.

Spider

Installation "Spider" Louise Bourgeois (photo below) has become a symbol of the late work of this sculptor. It presents an example of a perfect expressive and rational design, created by nature. In the symbolic dictionary of Bourgeois Louise, the spider does not carry any negative meaning. He is associated in Louise with a mother, intelligent, balanced, reasonable, patient, insightful, refined, useful, irreplaceable and neat, like a spider. This insect is associated with the industriousness of the parent, as well as with skillful craftsmanship.weaver. One of the works on this topic, created by Louise, is called “Mother”. The plastic monumental form, made of bronze, its conciseness and geometric simplicity demonstrate the sense of harmonic balance inherent in Bourgeois art.

First big exhibition

In 2000, the famous London gallery Tate Modern hosted the first major exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, which was called "I make, I destroy, I remake". It was she who declared its existence the State National Museum. Louise was the first sculptor to have her work housed in the new bastion of contemporary art. The success of the exhibition was enormous, and the choice of the master was by no means accidental, since Bourgeois's work is essentially an anthology of contemporary art.

Exhibition "Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Being: Cells"

In 2015, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presented a large-scale exhibition of Bourgeois in Moscow. This exhibition is dedicated to a series of environmental sculptures that Louise has created over the last 20 years of her life. It featured more than 80 works by Bourgeois: installations, early sculptures, drawings and paintings that preceded the pioneering cycle of works.

Louise Bourgeois, whose work is recognized all over the world, has lived a long life. She died of a heart attack at the age of 98 in New York City on May 31, 2010.