Bourgeois, Louise (b

rzhwä`), 1911–, French-American sculptor, b. Paris. She married the art historian Robert Goldwater Goldwater, Robert, 1907–73, American art historian, b. New York City. Goldwater taught at Queens College, N.Y., from 1934 to 1957, when he was appointed professor of fine arts at New York Univ.
..... Click the link for more information. in 1938, emigrated to the United States, and became a citizen. Her semiabstract sculpture employs many media, including wood, stone, plaster, metal, and latex, and has since the 1980s included installations encompassing room-sized environments. Characterized by organic forms, her sculpture is extremely personal, sensual, and symbolic, often dealing with female identity and sexuality. She has also created a variety of paintings, drawings, prints, and, beginning in the 1990s, textile works. In addition, she is known for her highly personal and often autobiographical writings. Virtually ignored for decades, Bourgeois was finally recognized in the 1980s and 90s and has influenced many women artists. Her work is in various museum collections, e.g., New York's Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, which held a 1982 retrospective of her work, as did the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2001.

Bibliography

See her Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997 (1998); studies by D. Wye (1982), P. Gardner (1994), C. Kotik (1994), P. Weiermair et al. (1995), J. Helfenstein (2002), M.-L. Bernadac et al. (2003), and E. Keller, ed. (2004); B. Cornand, dir., The Whisper of the Whistling Water (documentary film, 2004).

Bourgeois, Louise

(born Dec. 25, 1911, Paris, Fr.) French-born U.S. sculptor. She studied briefly with Fernand Léger and initially worked as a painter and engraver. In the late 1940s, after moving to New York City with her American husband, she turned to sculpture. She achieved recognition in the 1950s with wooden constructions painted uniformly black or white. She also worked in marble, plaster, latex, and glass. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness.

Bourgeois, Louise (b. Goldwater) (1911– ) sculptor, painter; born in Paris, France. She studied in Paris (1936–38), and settled in New York City (1938). She became known for her abstract sculptures, such as The Blind Leading the Blind (c. 1947–49), and her Cumul series, as seen in the marble Blind Man's Bluff (1984).