SACRED LEGACY ARCHIVES™

Louise Bourgeois

1911-12-25 – 2010-05-31

Louise Bourgeois, New York 1996Credit: Oliver Mark

Life & Legacy

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] ; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has a lot in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Occupation & Career

sculptor, visual artist, painter, illustrator, jewelry designer, photographer, draftsperson, installation artist, printmaker, performance artist, graphic artist, artist, author, teacher, pastellist, watercolorist, pen drawer, gallerist, writer, plastic artist

Education

Beaux-Arts de Paris; Art Students League of New York; Académie Julian; Lycée Fénelon, Paris; Académie de la Grande Chaumière; University of Paris; École du Louvre; Atelier 17; Académie Moderne

Accomplishments, Inventions & Publications

National Medal of Arts; Knight of the Legion of Honour; Praemium Imperiale; National Women's Hall of Fame; Wolf Prize in Arts; Austrian Decoration for Science and Art; Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Great Immigrants Award; honorary doctorate; Maman; The Welcoming Hands; Spider

Legacy Highlights

Honors & Awards

Austrian Decoration for Science and Art · Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences · Great Immigrants Award · honorary doctorate · Knight of the Legion of Honour · National Medal of Arts · National Women's Hall of Fame · Praemium Imperiale · Wolf Prize in Arts · Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award

Employer

Brooklyn College

Organizations & Memberships

American Abstract Artists · American Academy of Arts and Letters · American Academy of Arts and Sciences · Salvador Dalí & Louise Bourgeois

Notable Work

Maman · Spider · The Welcoming Hands

Education & Institutions

Académie de la Grande Chaumière · Académie Julian · Académie Moderne · Art Students League of New York · Atelier 17 · Beaux-Arts de Paris · École du Louvre · Lycée Fénelon, Paris · University of Paris