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.
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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