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.
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.
She entered the Sorbonne in 1930 to study mathematics — she loved geometry, she said later, because its rules could not be changed by anyone's behaviour. Her mother's death in 1932 broke the refuge, and she moved to art: the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, the Académie Julian, the Académie Ranson, and 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.
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.
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.
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.
Born in Paris on 25 December, into a family of tapestry dealers and restorers.
The family workshop settles at Choisy-le-Roi; as a child she draws in the missing sections of damaged tapestries.
Enters the Sorbonne to study mathematics — rules, she said, that nobody could change.
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.
The Museum of Modern Art gives her its first retrospective for a woman sculptor. She is seventy.
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.
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.
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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