936. Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010),

French/American, Sleeping Figure, 1950.

Painted balsa wood, 189.2 x 29.5 x 29.7 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Expressionism.

 

 

Louise Bourgeois

(1911 Paris – 2010 New York)

 

Louise Bourgeois was a very long-lived artist who has received popular and critical acclaim in the latter part of her life. After helping in her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop, she studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to art. In 1938 she married the noted American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she studied painting at the Arts Students’ League. The war years brought her into contact with refugee Europeans such as Joan Miró and André Masson, both Surrealists for whom she felt an affinity. Using both traditional materials (wood, bronze and marble) and non-traditional ones, Bourgeois created works which in their disturbing and often sexually explicit symbolism belong in the Surrealist tradition, but also reflect her shared preoccupations with the Feminist movement.