Who Was Louise Bourgeois? 7 Facts About the Surrealist Artist

Louise Bourgeois was a Surrealist artist born in Paris in 1910. In 1938, she moved to New York with her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater, where she lived and worked until her death at the age of 98. She was a loner throughout her life and did not hang around in the New York art scene, only later gaining attention and fame for her art. Today, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures and installations. As a woman, she is considered a pioneer in this field and is known as an icon of feminist art. Although sculpture and installation are Louise Bourgeois’ main work, she was also a painter and printmaker.

The works of Louise Bourgeois explore the themes of family, sexuality, and body, and are pervaded by injury and loss. In her work, Louise Bourgeois reflected the pain of her childhood and her relationship with her parents. Her parents were weavers who ran a carpet repair workshop with around 25 employees in their home in Choisy-le-Roi, France. While the artist’s relationship with her mother as a child was a very warm one, her relationship with her father was extremely difficult. In several interviews, the artist repeatedly stressed that she never managed to get over her traumatic childhood. For Louise Bourgeois, working on her artworks was a kind of therapeutic process.

The 2005 sculpture Together by Louise Bourgeois investigates some of these very themes surrounding intimacy and sexuality. The piece shows two figures touching tongues, or French kissing. The patchwork stitching across their heads reminds the viewer that these sculptures are manmade and thus fragile.

2. The Spider: A Symbol of Louise Bourgeois’ Mother

Contrary to what one might think at first glance, nothing is threatening about this spider. The spider is a symbol of the artist’s mother, who worked as a weaver and was a protective figure for the artist. Maman is also the French word for ‘Mom.’ Louise Bourgeois herself explained her sculpture in an interview with the Tate in 2008, saying, “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

From today’s perspective, the art of Louise Bourgeois is one of the most important figures in the art history of the 20th century, with works like Maman (1999) among the most famous ever created by a female artist. For most of the artist’s life, however, the art of Louise Bourgeois remained unknown to the larger public. This changed abruptly with a retrospective of her work in 1982 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After that, the French-American artist quickly became known to an international audience.

For Louise Bourgeois, however, exhibitions always remained secondary. The artist, who worked according to the credo, “I am what I do, not what I say,” never showed up at vernissages of her exhibitions, which took place from the 1980s onwards in cities such as New York, London, Venice, Paris, Bilbao, and more.

4. She Formed Her First Sculptures as a Child Out of Bread

Louise Bourgeois had a very troubled relationship with her father. It was thanks to him, as the artist repeatedly emphasized, that she experienced a double deception that she never fully overcame. Louise Bourgeois’ father had a romantic relationship with the English nanny who taught Louise English for over ten years, in her parental home and in front of both the mother and daughter. Louise Bourgeois felt betrayed by two of her most important people: her father and her nanny who was very close to her.

To distract herself from her father’s eternal speeches and degrading behavior, she as a child started forming figures out of bread, which she calls her “first sculptures” in a 3Sat documentary, “My father was always talking. I never had a chance to say anything. So, I started making little things out of bread. If someone is always talking and it hurts a lot what the person is saying, you can get distracted that way. You concentrate on doing something with your fingers. These figures were my first sculptures, and they represent an escape from something I didn’t want to hear. […] It was an escape from my father. I have done a lot of work on The Destruction of the Father. I do not forgive and I do not forget. That is the motto that feeds my work.”

In her quote, Louise Bourgeois refers to a well-known sculpture in her work: The Destruction of the Father (1974). In this three-dimensional sculpture, the artist settles accounts with her father in a certain way by alluding to the ancient myth of Saturn. In the ancient myth, Saturn is a father figure who eats his children. Bourgeois, however, reverses the legend and lets the children eat their father. Louise Bourgeois describes a scenario of destruction, as Sigmund Freud would have described it, in pictorial mania.

Before Louise Bourgeois devoted herself to studying art history and fine arts in the United States, she studied mathematics and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris. A glance at the artist’s paintings and drawings, reveals influences from these studies even today. The picture series Femme Maison (1946-47) is strongly influenced by geometric forms and a formal and philosophical examination of space.

In Femme Maison, Louise Bourgeois examined the relationship between women and home. In the paintings, the heads of the figures in the picture are replaced by houses. In a figurative sense, they represent a double role of the woman in her female body, whose thoughts are trapped in the house and the household. Painted in 1946 and 1947, these feminist paintings by Bourgeois can be considered ahead of their time. Although the artist has repeatedly created works of art that have a feminist message, Louise Bourgeois never openly joined the feminist movement.

6. The Most Famous Provocative Photograph of Louise Bourgeois Was Taken by Robert Mapplethorpe

Probably the most famous portrait photograph of the artist Louise Bourgeois was taken by a famous photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a picture one has to look at twice: At first glance, the black-and-white photography with a grey background seems rather unimpressive. The eye falls on the smiling face of the artist, Louise Bourgeois. It is only with the second glance that the viewer of the picture realizes that it must not be a friendly, but an almost gloating laugh the artist shows in the image. The picture shows the artist in a kind of surreal scene: It is only now that one recognizes that she is wearing a huge penis under her arm, a sculpture she made herself, which in its shriveled and rather ugly appearance is powerfully clamped under her right arm.

Robert Mapplethorpe later named the 1982 shoot in his New York studio on Bond Street “surreal.” He said, “You couldn’t sort of tell her too much, she was just there.” This image, which was created in the same year that Louise Bourgeois became famous worldwide with the retrospective at the New York MoMA, is a symbol of the artist’s attitude. “Revolt,” she once said in an interview, was the driving force behind her work. As one can see from her childhood reflections, it was a revolt against her father in particular, perhaps also against men in general.

This sculpture is called Eyes (2001) by Louise Bourgeois. Consisting of four bronze eyes staring from their grouping, or cloud, the pupils in this piece are clear and can illuminate at night. This artwork was created in the last decade of Louise Bourgeois’ life, and is representative of much of the rest of her catalog.

Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre was mainly dedicated to sculpture, and yet it is so varied and multifaceted that it is difficult to grasp. The artist reveals much about herself in her works. This gives her work the appearance of being able to be fully biographically and psychologically interpreted. Yet ambiguity is an important feature of Louise Bourgeois’ art. That is why it is always important to form one’s own picture when looking at her works.

Originally published: September 6, 2020. Last update: July 17, 2024, by Elizabeth Berry.