Louise Bourgeois, an artist whose bizarre spiders and sexually graphic sculptures propelled her to worldwide fame late in life, has died, aged 98.
Bourgeois died yesterday at Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York, two days after suffering a heart attack, her New York agent confirmed.
Bourgeois’ works, which are in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many other institutions, grappled with themes of sex and the body, violence and depression, marriage and motherhood, and aging and childhood.
During a career spanning more than seven decades, Bourgeois came to be known for a series of giant spiders, inspired by the artist’s beloved mother Josephine, who was a weaver.
One such arachnid has been on display for more than a decade in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in the US. Along with Magdalena Abakanowicz and Coosje van Bruggen, Bourgeois was one of only three women, out of 18 modern and contemporary sculptors, whose art is included in the garden.
Often lumped among the artists of the surrealist movement - a designation that the artist bristled at - Bourgeois’ art made frequent use of body parts and hybrid, sometimes amputated figures. It was, she often said, an expression of her attempts to come to terms with painful episodes in her life. One trauma in particular made a lasting impression.
Born in Paris on Christmas Day in 1911, Louise Bourgeois showed artistic talent at an early age. As an 11-year-old, she would assist in the family’s tapestry restoration business, sketching designs for missing pieces of textile.
After studying mathematics at the Sorbonne, she took up studio arts, attending classes in the 1930s at the ateliers of such painters as Fernand Leger.
In 1938, she married Robert Goldwater, a leading American art critic and historian who took his bride to New York later that year and introduced her to the power players of Manhattan’s art scene: prominent collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim; art dealer Leo Castelli; painters Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning; and sculptor Louise Nevelson.
Bourgeois continued her studies at the Art Students League, dividing her time at home between a conventional and bohemian lifestyle: raising three sons and, in her spare time, making art on the roof of her apartment building.
“Had I remained in Paris, I’m not sure I would have even been an artist.” Her husband died in 1973, and their son Michel Goldwater died in 1990.
Bloomberg