Post 5 in the Studios of Inspiration Series
Today we will explore the home studio of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois lived and worked in a brownstone townhouse in Chelsea, New York, West 22nd Street.
After the death of her husband, she removed most of the furniture from the home to make space for art making. In the photos of her home-turned-art-studio below, you will see the walls covered in ideas, sketches, and photos. It seems that after years of caring for her sons, she was finally fed up with domesticity and was ready for art to become her whole life.
Born in Paris, France in 1911, she is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations. Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. Her work explored themes of domesticity, motherhood, family dynamics, death, and the unconscious.
Her parents were tapestry restorers and dealers. Her father's infidelity was painful and inspired her work. Her mother was also a source for the "Maman" sculptures, her famous giant spiders, that she created later in life. While Louise was studying mathematics in 1932, her mother died. This inspired her to pursue art instead. She graduated from the Sorbonne in 1935 and for several years studied under the "masters" of the time. She later rejected the patriarchal idea of the male genius because of their lack of respect for and refusal to recognize women artists.
In 1938, she opened her own gallery in a space next door to her father's tapestry gallery. This is where she met a visiting American art professor. They married and moved New York. They had three sons.
She worked on her art through the 40's and struggled to assimilate into the New York art world. Her work was inspired by her troubled past, finding catharsis from childhood betrayal, and the abuse she suffered from her father. She got very little attention from the art world during this time despite having her first solo show in 1945.
The 50's and 60's lead her to new mediums and subjects concerned with sexuality, motherhood, and the feminine. Louise considered her art not femininst but "pre-gender."
In the early 1970s, Bourgeois held gatherings called "Sunday, bloody Sundays" at her home in Chelsea. These salons would be filled with young artists and students whose work would be critiqued by Bourgeois. Bourgeois was ruthlessness in critique accompanied by a dry sense of humor. She also aligned herself with activists and became a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective. The group defended the use of sexual imagery in artwork. She also created work from the 90's up until her death in 2010 to advocate for LGBT causes.
She received her first retrospective in 1982 at MOMA. Until then, she had been a peripheral figure in art whose work was more admired than acclaimed. Her autobiographical work was finally being recognized.
She died in 2010 at the age of 98, making work up until the last week of her life.
Now, let us take a peek into the home-turned-studio!
There are several video interviews and photos of her painting late into the night at this very table.
It is so interesting the way she stripped everything back to basic living essentials. Looking at her Femme Mansion series, I can't help but think of her finally free from the shackles of domesticity to live her life fully for art.
Louise Bourgeois was an incredible artist who's work inspires me greatly. I had so much fun peeking into her studio with you!
