Louise Bourgeois

(American/French, 1911–2010)

Louise Bourgeois was a eminent American-French artist of the 20th century, recognized for her abstract sculptures, drawings and prints, and perhaps best know for her arachnid-like Maman sculptures. The artist’s brooding works were culled from childhood memories as well as psychological analyses of sexuality, pain, and fear. “The only access we have to our volcanic unconscious and to the profound motives for our actions and reactions is through shocks of our encounters with specific people,” she once reflected. Born on December 25, 1911 in Paris, France, Bourgeois first studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before changing paths and enrolling in art school. She studied under Fernand Léger at the École des Beaux-Arts and later with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League of New York, having emigrated to the United States in 1938. Largely underappreciated during her early career, she garnered critical and public acclaim after her retrospective debuted at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. The artist died on May 31, 2010 in New York, NY at the age of 98 of a heart attack. Today, Bourgeois’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.