State Hermitage Museum
St. Petersburg
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812 1173420 FAX 812 3121567
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Louise Bourgeois
dal 10/10/2001 al 13/1/2002
812.3113420 FAX 812.3121567
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10/10/2001

Louise Bourgeois

State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

The work of Louise Bourgeois can be described as an encyclopaedia of modern art. In it one can detect traces of the influence of all the leading artistic tendencies of the 20th century - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Abstractionism and Conceptualism, but at the same time the artist’s sculpture, painting and graphic art is marked by an emphatically personal expression of her creative identity.


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The work of Louise Bourgeois can be described as an encyclopaedia of modern art. In it one can detect traces of the influence of all the leading artistic tendencies of the 20th century - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Abstractionism and Conceptualism, but at the same time the artist’s sculpture, painting and graphic art is marked by an emphatically personal expression of her creative identity. All Louise Bourgeois’s works were created under the influence of her impressions of life, impressions that have their roots deep in the artist’s childhood. Bourgeois herself spoke figuratively of being "like a collector of spaces and memories".

Bourgeois’s numerous exhibitions have become real cultural events for the acknowledged world capital’s of modern art - New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Venice and Madrid. Her works are present in the most famous collections of 20th-century art - the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Louise Bourgeois spent her childhood and youth in France. She was born in Paris on 25 December 1911. Her family was engaged in the restoration and sale of antique tapestries. In 1936 Bourgeois began to study fine art seriously in noted Parisian art schools and studios, including the celebrated Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The nascent artist visited the studio of the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi who was then a cult figure for the Parisian avant-garde; took lessons from the celebrated Cubist Fernand Léger who appreciated Bourgeois’s talent and prompted her to take up sculpture. She names as her teachers Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso and André Derain. In 1938 Louise Bourgeois moved to New York where she has lived for more than 60 years now. It was in New York that her creative career began.

A tremendous influence on her oeuvre came through her acquaintance with prominent exponents of American Abstract Expressionism - Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

At her first personal exhibition, at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York in 1945, the artist presented large ornamental planar painted panels. In the late 1940s Bourgeois turned her hand to sculpture for the first time. Her first experiments have the formal effect of primitive anthropomorphic ritual cult objects, archaic Ancient Greek, African and Pre-Columbian sculpture. In these works one can distinctly detect the influence of some of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti who also drew on archaic plastic art. Bourgeois’s first sculptures were exhibited in the Peridot Gallery in New York.

In 1974 Bourgeois created her first installation, initiating a new phase in her creative biography. In the work The Destruction of the Father the sculptor gives expression in complex plastic form to painful memories, instincts dwelling in the unconscious mind, evoked by the conflictory relations with her father that arose in childhood. The Spider was to become a symbol of Bourgeois’s late work, as an example of a perfect, rational and expressive construction created by nature. For Bourgeois the spider is associated with her mother, with her patience, the industriousness and masterly skill of the weaver restoring tapestries. The monumental form cast in bronze, its geometric simplicity and laconism demonstrates the astonishing sense of harmonious equilibrium that is inherent in Louise Bourgeois’s art.

A scholarly catalogue has been prepared and published for the exhibition. It has an introduction by Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and Julia Silvester. The article on the artist’s work was written by Sophia Kudriavtseva, senior researcher at the State Hermitage.

The conference "Art of Louise Bourgeois: The Encyclopedia of modern art" 11 October 2001

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