Louise Bourgeois, who died in May 2010, was one of the most important living and working American artists up until the time of her death. A former studio assistant to Miró, she has became over the past sixty years, a significant presence both as a sculptor and as a printmaker. Her work had its roots in surrealism but was always centered on problems of gender and sexuality. Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois was raised as the middle child between two siblings. Prompted by her father to create herself as both a woman and an intellectual, Bourgeois studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before going on to receive her Baccalaureate in philosophy from the University of Paris in 1932. It was this foundation which impelled Bourgeois to pronounce, “I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible.”

Bourgeois' father instilled not only the importance of an education, but of family values. Yet he created a certain amount of confusion as he carried on a long-term affair with the family tutor. This double set of standards became a central theme in both the art of Louise Bourgeois and her conversation. She once stated that “everything I create comes from something personal; some memory or personal experience.” Bourgeois began her formal artistic training in Paris with Fernand Léger. In 1938 she moved to New York. Within the year she married the art historian Robert Goldwater, with whom she had three children. It was during this time that Bourgeois was influenced by the influx of artists to American who had fled Europe during WWII. The European Surrealists especially appealed to Bourgeois’ psychoanalytical interests. Bourgeois, like many of the Surrealists, incorporated abstract and organic shapes that acted as sexual metaphors. Some of these images whimsically related to what she called, “the magic and the mystery” of her childhood. Others demonstrated sets of binary oppositions, such as "imprisonment" v. "escape" and "secret" v. "exposed." Bourgeois believed that her art developed as a result of unsatisfied desires.

The art of Louise Bourgeois was created over a span of sixty years. Besides working within a surrealist strain in the late 1930's and early 1940's, she was an important force during the rise of the American Abstract Expressionists in the late 1940's and early 1950's, as well as during the 1960's and 1970's feminist movement. Bourgeois has been called everything from a Minimalist to an “eccentric abstractionist” (by the art historian Lucy Lippard). Bourgeois received an honorary degree from Yale in 1977, and was awarded an Achievement Visual Arts Award by the Woman’s Caucus for the Arts in 1980. Though Bourgeois exhibited in major museums all over the world, she was recognized as primarily a "woman’s artist" until the Museum of Modern Art gave her a one-person show in 1982. It was this show that finally launched Bourgeois to artistic stardom. In 1994, MoMA launched a major retrospective of Bourgeois' complete prints and published a catalogue raisonné to go along with the show

In 1975 Lippard praised Bourgeois as an artist who “despite her apparent fragility survived almost 40 years of discrimination, struggle, intermittent success and neglect in New York’s gladiatorial art arenas.” Bourgeois proved that she was not only a survivor, but an artistically and intellectually competent personality to be reckoned with. (Melissa Banigan contributed to this essay)

Bibliography: General works: Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 2001); Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father (Cambridge MA: MIT, 1997); Louise Bourgeois and Lawrence Rinder, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings and Observations (Boston: Bulfinch and Berkeley: Universiity of California Art Museum, 1995); Louise Bourgeois with Deborah Wye and William Rubin, Louise Bourgeois (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1982); Louise Bourgeois, Pensees-Plumes (Paris. Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995); Louise Bourgeois, Sculptures (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1995); Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells (Munich: Prestel, 1998); Bosco Gallardo, Louise Bourgeois: Memoria y Arquitectura (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof¡a, 1999); Paulo Herkenhoff, Louise Bourgeois (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil 1997); Charlotta Kotik, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory. Works 1982-1994 (NY: Abrams, 1994); Stuart Morgan, Louise Bourgeois (Cincinnati, OH: The Taft Museum 1987: catalogue of the traveling exhibition at 5 US institutions in all, 1987-89); Jason Smith, ed. Louise Bourgeois (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1995).

Prints: Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Wye, and Carol Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois. NY: Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 1994 (print catalogue raisonné, based upon a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Inner Life (MoMA 78). Original 2-color photolithograph, 1985. 100 signed and numbered impressions. It was based on one of the artist's favorite drawings, which she decided to turn into a lithograph on the occasion of a retrospective of her early sculptures and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. After photographically transferring the image to a stone, a second color was then printed on top for the signed and numbered edition. An unsigned edition without the second color also exists. A porfolio of Bourgeios' early lithographs just sold at auction for a price that averaged over Please call or email for current pricing information per piece. Image size: 314x210mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

An unsigned impression without the beige overlay is available for Please call or email for current pricing information (see below).

Inner Life (MoMA 78). Original photolithograph, 1985. 100 signed and numbered impressions.It was based on one of the artist's favorite drawings, which she decided to turn into a lithograph on the occasion of a retrospective of her early sculptures and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. After photographically transferring the image to a stone, a second color was then printed on top for the signed and numbered edition. An unsigned edition without the second color also exists; this edition includes her signature in the stone lower right. When MoMA introduced the catalogue raisonné of her prints in an exhibition of her complete prints, they included another impression of the unsigned version in the show. Image size: 310x215mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Sheaves (MoMA 77). Original 2-color photolithograph, 1985. 100 signed and numbered impressions. It was based on one of the artist's favorite drawings, which she decided to turn into a lithograph on the occasion of a retrospective of her early sculptures and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. After photographically transferring the image to a stone, a second color was then printed on top for the signed and numbered edition. An unsigned edition without the second color also exists (as shown here); this edition includes her signature in the stone lower right. When MoMA introduced the catalogue raisonné of her prints in an exhibition of her complete prints, they included another impression of the unsigned version in the show. Image size: 310x215mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Museum of Modern Art has launched a major website documenting the printmaking of Louise Bourgeois. This site, Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, focuses on the artist’s creative process by presenting the many evolving states she made in the lead-up to her final print compositions. It also places Bourgeois’s prints and illustrated books within the context of her overall production by including sculptures and drawings that deal with the same themes and imagery. This approach is particularly meaningful for Bourgeois’s work, since she constantly reworked her compositions and investigated the same core themes throughout her career.

Bourgeois’s printmaking flourished during the early and late phases of her career: in the 1930s and 1940s, when she first came to New York from Paris, and then again starting in the 1980s, when her work began to receive wide recognition. Early on, she made prints at home on a small press, or at the renowned workshop Atelier 17. That period was followed by a long hiatus, as Bourgeois turned her attention fully to sculpture. It was not until she was in her 70s that she began to make prints again, encouraged first by print publishers. She set up her old press, and added a second, while also working closely with printers who came to her house to collaborate. A very active phase of printmaking followed, lasting until the artist’s death in 2010, at the age of 98. Bourgeois’s total print output numbers some 3,500 sheets, including evolving states and final compositions."

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