Louise Bourgeois: biography and creativity

We invite you to get acquainted with one of the most interesting masters of the 20th century - Louise Bourgeois. Her biography and work are presented in this article. L. Bourgeois - American sculptor, graphic artist and painter of French origin. Louise is an artist who mythologized his nightmares and obsessions, as well as the facts of his childhood. In her adult life there were no real shocks, but the Bourgeois did not cease to cherish her mental trauma, which tormented her from an early age.

Childhood and the drama of Louise

Louise was born in 1911 in Paris. The childhood of the bourgeoisie was held in Aubusson, a French province. Here her family owned a workshop for the restoration of tapestries. In adolescence, Louise was given to the Lyceum Fenellona - a prestigious educational institution. The girl was very close to her mother, Josephine. Louise often helped Josephine in her work: drawing, sewing, repairing tapestries.

Relations between parents with external well-being were far from ideal. Father Louise almost openly betrayed his wife with an Englishwoman - the governess of their children. For a little girl, this trivial situation has become a real drama. She experienced her whole life, and also rethought in the work. His father, Louise considered a traitor. She even attempted to commit suicide after the death of her mother.

University studies and private lessons

Louise Bourgeois in 1932 entered the Sorbonne. Here she studied philosophy, geometry and mathematics. In the same year, Bourgeois visited the USSR. Since 1936, Louise has been engaged in art studios and schools in Paris. She also visited the workshop of Constantine Brancusi, a great sculptor who at that time was a cult figure of the local avant-garde. Louise took lessons from Fernand Leger, the celebrated cubist. He appreciated her giftedness and encouraged the girl to study sculpture.

Marriage and death of a spouse

An important event in Louise's personal life took place in 1938, when she married Robert Goldwater, an American art critic and Harvard graduate. After the wedding, the young moved to New York. Here, Bourgeois's husband began to work in the Museum of Prehistoric Art (he was appointed its first director). An exemplary union of loving creative people lasted until 1974, when the husband of Louise died. She bore him three sons.

Painting and Graphics Louise

Bourgeois at the beginning of his creative career was engaged in painting and graphics. In the series of works by Femme Maison, created in 1945-1947, and Fallen Women (1946-1947), the artist used the technique of the Surrealists. She fused together different objects: structures similar to houses, and a woman's body. These works are a reflection of Louise about the role that a woman plays in a family. Many define this role solely as caring for a home. However, the Bourgeois herself claims that her work is a parody of surrealism, which tried to present a woman in the form of a design.

Appeal to sculpture

Louise in the 1940s focused on sculpture. In it, she is considered one of the best masters of the 20th century. In the first plastic experiments of Louise, the influence of archaic Ancient Greek, ancient American and African sculpture is noticeable. They are influenced by such great masters of the last century, as Henry Moore, Constantine Barncusi and Alberto Giacometti, who also relied on their work on archaic plastics. The sculptures of the Bourgeois initially consisted of groups of organic and abstract forms, which were often made of wood.

"Blind, leading the blind"

"Blind, leading the blind," created in 1947, one of the most famous works of Louise Bourgeois. It can be considered a direct roll call with the "Parable of the Blind", performed by Peter Bruegel the eldest. The work of Louise is a design consisting of 20 long pink wooden supports, tapering downwards, and at the top connected by a screed-bridge. The simplicity of this sculpture is discouraging, and the feeling of unreliability and instability captures. The Bourgeois declares that this work is simply a reminiscence of the child's desire to hide under the table when family scandals occur in the family.

New materials

In the 1960s, such materials as stone, bronze and latex began to be used in sculptures by Louise. After visiting Italy, marble was added to them. In 1949, the first sculptures of the Bourgeois were exhibited - in New York, in the Perido gallery.

Interest in the "dark side" and sexuality

Louise is an artist-post-surrealist, who declared himself in the 1930s-1940s. At that time, the French surrealist movement had already fallen into disrepair. Artists related to him, never created a cohesive group. They were not inclined to manifest, broadcast programs and declarative statements. At first, a group stood out among these masters, which differed not only in its interest in the "dark side" of intellectual and psychic life peculiar to romantics, but also in the body that was the manifestation of the "dark side". That is why sexuality for Louise is associated with trauma, as well as with a painful search for one's own identity, a role in relations between the sexes. In 1968, Bourgeois introduced two sculptures, which are both shocking and ironic: "Blooming Janus" and "Girl."

"Girl"

It is made of latex giant phallus, swinging on the butcher's hook. This sculpture reflects the critical view of Louise Bourgeois on the iconography of the phallus, as well as the male status associated with it . The base of the sculpture can be read both as male testes, as a woman's breast, and as rounded hips of a woman, bounding the crotch.

"Blooming Janus"

"Blossoming Janus" is a work in which the connection of gender forms, flowing one into another, is reflected. In Latin, "Janus" means "passage", "arch". However, it is simultaneously a two-faced god who has one face turned to the past and the other looks to the future, to janua - to the divine gate open in peacetime and closing in the period of wars. The rigid and monolithic base of the sculpture is an image of two flaccid penises, which are connected to a central element, almost formless, resembling pubic hair and a sexual slit. The adjective "blooming" indicates the metaphor of the genitals as an aroma and flowering. The feminine and the masculine have merged together, like two faces. Two penises are simultaneously similar to female buttocks, hips and breasts.

"The Destruction of the Father"

Louise Bourgeois in 1974 completed her first installation. She opened a new stage in the creative biography of the master. In the work of Bourgeois "Destruction of the Father," the sculptor realizes in painful plastic form the painful memories and instincts that live in the subconscious, which are caused by a conflict with his father, who gravitated over the author from childhood. Installation is a structure that looks like a cave. Figures resembling stones surround the sacrificial plate with the body parts scattered on it, including pieces of real lamb, which were bought in a butcher's shop.

This work by Louise is very disturbing, reminiscent of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, whom the Bourgeois appreciated.

The "cell" period

In the 1990s, Louise Bourgeois continued to work actively. Its creativity passes to a new stage - the "cell" period. The artist considered one of her goals the creation of an environment, which would be self-sufficient, independent of the museum environment. You can enter this environment. These structures are a kind of isolation of experience gained in the past. Cell (Choisy) - a cell in which there is a marble sculpture of the house. Above it is a large guillotine. This sculpture resembles an episode of a nightmare.

Couple IV

The works of Louise Bourgeois of a later period include a series of heads, as well as figures made of cloth. They depict different degrees of despair and pain. For example, the work of the 1997 Couple IV represents something reminiscent of the old-fashioned display from the museum. It shows two ragged figures without heads trying to make love.

"Spider"

The installation of the "Spider" Louise Bourgeois (pictured below) became a symbol of the late creation of this sculptor. It presents a sample of a perfect expressive and rational design, created by nature. In the symbolic Dictionary of the Bourgeois Louise, the spider does not carry any negative meaning. He associates with Louise with his mother, intelligent, balanced, judicious, patient, penetrating, refined, useful, irreplaceable and accurate, like a spider. This insect is associated with the diligence of the parent, as well as with the skillful skill of the weaver. One of the works on this theme, created by Louise, is called - "Mama". A plastic monumental form made of bronze, its conciseness and geometric simplicity demonstrate the sense of harmonic balance characteristic of the art of Bourgeois.

The first big exhibition

In 2000, the famous London gallery Tate Modern held the first major exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, which was called "I do, I destroy, I remake." It was she who declared the existence of the State National Museum. Louise became the first sculptor whose works were placed in a new bastion of modern art. The success of the exhibition was huge, and the choice of the master is by no means accidental, since the work of the Bourgeois, in its essence, is an anthology of contemporary art.

The exhibition "Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Being: Cages"

In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art "Garage" presented a large-scale Bourgeois exhibition in Moscow. This exhibition is devoted to a series of sculptures, environmental events, which were created by Louise in the last 20 years of her life. It featured more than 80 works by Bourgeois: installations, early sculptures, drawings and paintings that preceded the innovative cycle of works.

Louise Bourgeois, whose work is recognized throughout the world, lived a long life. She died of a heart attack at the age of 98 in New York on May 31, 2010.