BOURGEOIS, LOUISE

born Dec. 25, 1911, Paris, France French-born sculptor known for her monumental abstract and often biomorphic works that deal with the relationships of men and women. Observer, painted wood sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, c. 194749, height 1.94 metres Born to a family of tapestry weavers, Bourgeois made her first drawings to assist her parents in their restoration of ancient tapestries. She attended the Sorbonne, where she studied mathematics. At the age of 25 she changed her focus to art, studying at the cole des Beaux-Arts, the Acadmie de la Grande Chaumire, and the studio of Fernand Lger, and in 1938 she married and returned with her American husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, to New York City. There she began exhibiting her distinctly Surrealist paintings and engravings. In the late 1940s she began to experiment with sculptural forms, producing a series of long, lean wooden shapes that she exhibited singly and in groups (see photograph). These were the first of her characteristically abstract but emotionally powerful autobiographical works. In the following decades she built many often unsettling environments of latex and found objects and structures of marble, plaster, and glass. Most concern betrayal, anxiety, revenge, obsession, aggression, imbalance, and loneliness. She often reexamined themes, styles, and forms that had earlier interested her. This unwillingness to limit her creative output to a particular style or medium made her more difficult to categorize and kept her at the unpublicized fringe of the art world. In 1982 she was granted a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, an honour seldom granted to a living artist, and in 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.