Sculptor of the giant Maman spiders, born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911 and raised in her parents' tapestry restoration workshop — the weaving and mending behind the spiders. New York claimed her from 1938, but the material was French, and she said so all her life.
Louise Bourgeois is filed everywhere as a New York sculptor, and the filing misses where the work comes from. She was born in Paris on 25 December 1911, and raised in her parents' tapestry restoration workshop at Choisy-le-Roi, where as a child she earned her keep drawing in the missing sections of damaged tapestries. The giant bronze spiders she made in her late eighties — each titled Maman, mother — are her stated homage to the woman who ran that workshop: a weaver, a mender, patient and useful.
The other Paris inheritance was a wound. Her father installed his mistress — Sadie, the children's English governess — in the household for a decade, in the family's full view, and Bourgeois spent seven decades of art on the betrayal. She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne, switched to art when her mother died in 1932, trained across five Paris academies — Fernand Léger told her she was a sculptor, not a painter — and ran a print shop on the rue de Seine until an American professor walked in, married her, and took her to New York in 1938.
Bourgeois was born on Christmas Day 1911 in Paris, the middle child of Joséphine and Louis Bourgeois, who dealt in and restored antique tapestries — a gallery in the city, and a restoration workshop at Choisy-le-Roi on the river Bièvre, whose waters served the dyeing. The child Louise was good at drawing, so the workshop used her: she filled in the worn and missing sections of tapestry designs, feet and flowers mostly. Repairing images of damage became, on her own account, the template for everything she made.[1]
The household also contained the family's English governess, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who was her father's mistress for a decade, openly. The arrangement — the charming, betraying father; the mother who endured it; the child expected to notice nothing — supplied Bourgeois with her lifelong subject matter, and she never pretended otherwise. Psychoanalysis, which she undertook for decades, was as much a studio practice as a treatment.[2]
She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics — she loved geometry, she said later, because its rules could not be changed by anyone's behaviour. The Museum of Modern Art dates her time there to 1932–38. The Easton Foundation places her baccalaureate and her entry after her mother's death in September 1932. That death broke the refuge, and she moved to art. She worked through the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, the Académie Julian and the Académie Ranson, and then the studio of Fernand Léger, who looked at her work and told her she was a sculptor. She also guided at the Louvre and, in 1937, opened a small gallery dealing in prints and drawings on the rue de Seine.[3]
Into the rue de Seine shop in 1938 came Robert Goldwater, an American art historian buying Picasso prints. They married that year and she left for New York, where she would live for the next seventy-two years — showing paintings from 1945, carving the totem-like Personages on her apartment roof in the late 1940s, and remaining, through the whole reign of Abstract Expressionism, almost invisible.[1]
The Museum of Modern Art gave Bourgeois a retrospective in 1982, when she was seventy — its first ever for a woman sculptor — and the last three decades of her life reversed the first five. The Cells, room-sized enclosures of doors, mirrors, tapestry fragments and carved marble hands, occupied the 1990s. In 1999 she made the first Maman: a spider over nine metres tall — the original in steel, the later casts in bronze — standing guard over a sac of marble eggs, titled with the child's word for mother.[3]
Maman inaugurated Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000, and its casts now stand outside museums from Bilbao to Ottawa to Tokyo. Her explanation was consistent and Parisian: the spider was her mother — a weaver who repaired things, clever, patient, indispensable. She worked until the end, running her Sunday salons for young artists in Chelsea, and died in New York on 31 May 2010, aged ninety-eight.[4]
In 1974 Bourgeois showed the most direct thing she ever made about her childhood, after roughly a decade out of view. Wide recognition still did not arrive until the retrospective of 1982.[2]
The Destruction of the Father is a room-sized enclosure lit dull red, its floor and ceiling covered in soft bulbous forms cast in plaster and latex. In the middle is what reads as a table, with shapes on it that could be food or could be a body. Her own account was a fantasy from the dinner table: the father talks and talks, the children pull him onto the table, dismember him and eat him.
She was sixty-two, she had been in analysis for two decades, and she had said almost none of this in public. The work was made the year after her husband Robert Goldwater died.
From 1991 Bourgeois built enclosures she called Cells: rooms made from salvaged doors, wire mesh, windows and steel, holding furniture, clothes, mirrors, marble body parts and glass vessels. A viewer can look into them but mostly cannot enter.
The word Cell carries both meanings Bourgeois wanted. A cell is a prison, and a cell is the smallest unit of a living thing, and the works are about confinement and about the parts a person is built from.
Bourgeois made around sixty Cells over some seventeen years, and they are the form her late work is best known for after the spiders. Several hold objects from her own house — her actual clothes, her parents' tapestry tools, perfume bottles — so that the sculpture is partly a reliquary.[4]
From the early 1990s Bourgeois held open afternoons at her house on West 20th Street in Chelsea, and any artist could ask to come.
The format was fixed and not gentle. Each visitor brought work, showed it to the room, and Bourgeois said what she thought, at length and without diplomacy. She was in her eighties and then her nineties, and she ran the sessions until close to the end of her life.
The Sunday salons became a New York institution and a rite of passage. It is a strange coda for someone who had worked in near-total obscurity until she was seventy: three decades of fame spent, in part, telling young artists exactly where their work was failing.
Bourgeois made her first spider drawings in the 1940s and returned to the form in the 1990s, at over eighty, in the works that now stand outside museums in Bilbao, Ottawa, Tokyo and London.
The spider is her mother. She said so directly, and wrote a short text to go with the sculptures. A spider is a weaver, and her mother restored tapestries. A spider is patient, clever and useful, and eats mosquitoes. A spider repairs its web when it is torn instead of complaining.
Maman, the largest of the spiders, stands over nine metres high, holds a sac of marble eggs under its body, and rests on legs thin enough that the whole thing looks provisional. It is a monument to a weaver, made by a daughter who had spent her childhood repairing tapestries in the family workshop, and it reads to most viewers as a threat. Bourgeois was content for both to be true.
Born in Paris on 25 December, into a family of tapestry dealers and restorers.
The family workshop is at Choisy-le-Roi, where as a child she draws in the missing sections of damaged tapestries. The Museum of Modern Art dates the workshop there to 1912–19, and the move to Antony to 1919.
Enters the Sorbonne to study mathematics — rules, she said, that nobody could change. The Museum of Modern Art gives 1932–38; her mother died that September.
Her mother dies; she leaves mathematics for art, training at the Beaux-Arts, the Grande-Chaumière, Julian and Ranson academies and in Fernand Léger's studio.
Opens a print gallery on the rue de Seine.
Marries the American art historian Robert Goldwater, who walked into the shop as a customer, and moves to New York.
Her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, dies.
Shows The Destruction of the Father, a red-lit enclosure built on a fantasy of the family dismembering and eating him at the dinner table.
The Museum of Modern Art gives her its first retrospective for a woman sculptor. She is seventy.
Begins holding open Sunday afternoons at her Chelsea house, at which any artist can show work and be told what she thinks of it.
Begins the Cells, enclosures built from salvaged doors, mesh and steel, holding furniture, clothes and marble body parts.
Makes the first Maman, the nine-metre spider — steel original, bronze casts — titled with the child's word for mother.
Maman inaugurates the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London.
Dies in New York on 31 May, aged ninety-eight, still working.
Sculpture
Tall black steel panels are hinged together into a folding wall that closes around a small room. Inside it a stool stands alone on a pale floor and a cluster of black rubber shapes hangs on threads against a cream-coloured screen. Louise Bourgeois made Articulated Lair in 1986, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York has held it since 1993.
Sculpture
A cage of wire mesh stands about three metres high with a model of a house carved in marble on a table inside it. A guillotine is mounted on a frame directly above, its blade set diagonally and a chain hanging beside it. Louise Bourgeois made the work between 1990 and 1993 and titled it for Choisy-le-Roi, the town outside Paris where her family lived and restored tapestries. Glenstone, in Potomac, Maryland, owns it.
Sculpture
A bronze spider nine metres tall stands on eight thin legs, its body held high enough for a visitor to walk underneath. A wire-mesh sac of marble eggs hangs beneath the abdomen. Louise Bourgeois made the steel original in 1999 for the opening of Tate Modern, and six bronze casts followed. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao owns cast 2 of 6, made in 2001, and keeps it outdoors beside the footbridge.
Sculpture
A chamber about 2.4 metres high is packed with soft bulbous forms above and below and lit throughout in red. In the middle is a low table carrying shapes that read as meat. Louise Bourgeois made it in 1974, the year after her husband died, and showed it in New York at 112 Greene Street. Glenstone, in Potomac, Maryland, owns it.
A naked woman stands with a tall house in place of her head and shoulders, one hand waving out of the roofline. Louise Bourgeois printed the image as a line block on the folded announcement for her exhibition of paintings at the Norlyst Gallery in New York, which ran from 28 October to 8 November 1947. The right-hand leaf lists the seventeen paintings by title. The Museum of Modern Art holds the sheet as 448.2010.
Met · 1934
She trained in Leger's Paris studio in the mid-1930s, one of the five academies of her art education, and credited him with the observation that redirected her career: he looked at her work and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter.
For her mother. Joséphine Bourgeois ran the family's tapestry restoration workshop at Choisy-le-Roi outside Paris, and Bourgeois said the spider was her portrait: a weaver and mender, clever, patient, protective and useful. The giant spiders are titled Maman — the child's word for mother. The first was made in 1999, when Bourgeois was eighty-seven.
Both, in sequence. She was born in Paris on 25 December 1911, raised in the family tapestry workshop, and trained across the Sorbonne and five Paris academies before marrying the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moving to New York, where she lived until her death in 2010. She took US citizenship in 1951; the subject matter of the work stayed French.
Two things she mined for seventy years. She worked in her parents' tapestry restoration workshop, drawing in the missing pieces of damaged weavings — repair as a first artistic act. And her father kept his mistress, the children's English governess Sadie Gordon Richmond, inside the household for a decade in open view; the betrayal and her mother's endurance of it became the engine of the work, from the Femme Maison ('Woman House') paintings — women's bodies with houses for heads — to the Cells.
At seventy. She had shown since 1945 in New York with little recognition; the Museum of Modern Art's 1982 retrospective — its first for a woman sculptor — reversed everything, and the last three decades of her life made her one of the most celebrated artists alive. The Maman spiders, the work most people know, began when she was eighty-seven.
Casts of the nine-metre spider stand outside the Guggenheim Bilbao, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Leeum museum in Seoul and Qatar's national convention centre, among others; the steel original belongs to Tate, where it first stood in the Turbine Hall in 2000. There is no permanent Maman in Paris — the city she made spiders about.
A room-sized enclosure Bourgeois showed in 1974, lit dull red, its floor and ceiling covered in soft bulbous forms, with a table in the middle. Her own account was a dinner-table fantasy in which the father talks and talks until the children pull him onto the table, dismember him and eat him. She was sixty-two, and it was made the year after her husband died.
Enclosures she built from 1991 onwards out of salvaged doors, wire mesh, windows and steel, holding furniture, clothes, mirrors and marble body parts, which a viewer can look into but mostly not enter. She made around sixty. The word carries both senses she wanted: a prison, and the smallest unit of a living thing.
Open afternoons Bourgeois held at her house on West 20th Street in Chelsea from the early 1990s, at which any artist could ask to come, show work and hear what she thought of it, at length and without diplomacy. She ran them into her nineties and they became a New York rite of passage.
Met · 1934
She trained in Leger's Paris studio in the mid-1930s, one of the five academies of her art education, and credited him with the observation that redirected her career: he looked at her work and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter.
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