bourgeois value

January 25, 2018 8:08 AM

Outing the Inside

After we’re done shaking our heads at what they had to endure, we project onto our long-lived women artists a mystique that’s as old as history—that of the sorceress or the good witch. These women have a secret. We want them to tell us everything, but maybe they don’t want to. If we can gain access to their magical workshop, squeezing through a narrow corridor to find the door, we might be privy to some important mysteries. The veils will be unwound, and finally we will look life in the face and weep for all that was lost to get us here.
In her long life, Louise Bourgeois experienced both extremes of the female artist story—marginalization, even invisibility early on, and decades later a fierce and passionate following by younger artists and curators

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, MoMA, through Jan. 28

Louise Bourgeois Was More Than A Sculptor
The Print Legacy of Louise Bourgeois Unfolds at MoMA
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, a Conversation with Curator Deborah Wye

In 1982, as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Deborah Wye organized a retrospective exhibition devoted to Louise Bourgeois, who was then 70 years old. It was the museum’s first one-person survey of a woman artist in well over 30 years. Later, Bourgeois donated an archive of her printed work to MoMA and, in 1994, Wye organized an exhibition of Bourgeois’s prints to accompany the publication of a catalogue raisonné. Over the next 17 years, the artist, who died in May 2010, produced a vastly expanded body of prints, for which Wye has now edited a comprehensive online catalogue. The exhibition Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, on view at MoMA until January 28, 2018, celebrates that publication.

a talk on The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr
Storr's new book Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, reviewed.
A round-table talk with Christopher Lyon, Linda Norden, Martha Schwendener, Léa Vuong, and Robert Storr :

hristopher Lyon: First I'd like to say something about the book we're here to discuss. This 828-page tome on the art and life of Louise Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 and died in 2010, is the product of some thirty years of work on Robert Storr's part. It comprehensively surveys Bourgeois's career as an artist, which spanned nearly seventy-five years, with more than nine hundred illustrations. Chapters relating Bourgeois's life and analyzing her creative achievement alternate with portfolios, in chronological sequence, that show the unfolding of her oeuvre. The final chapter is a coda that details Rob's close and complicated relationship with his subject, beginning in the early 1980s. It is, and probably will remain, the definitive monograph on Louise.

Robert Storr: I don't think there's such a thing as a definitive book, that's part of my point. It will be the first essai at making a comprehensive book. I should just say in parentheses that the fact it exists at all is very much to the credit of Chris, who has stayed with this project long past the patience of most mere mortals. In terms of design, production, the whole thing.

posted by the man of twists and turns (3 comments total)

Fantastic post! I was given Storr's book for Christmas, and am slowly wading in. She has such a vast body of work, to say nothing of her biography. There's too much there, there.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 8:34 AM on January 25, 2018

I love Louise Bourgeois! I was lucky enough to see some of her textile work exhibited a bit more than 10 years ago, and it was life-changing. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for Storr's book.
posted by platitudipus at 8:38 AM on January 25, 2018

Also, to add to this great collection of articles, MOMA has the Louise Bourgeois Collection online. (I've spent half the afternoon browsing it.)
posted by platitudipus at 2:31 PM on January 25, 2018 [1 favorite]