àPARA }PAR@ ` òTEXT ` çBourgeois, Louise1911╨ sculptor Born in Paris on December 25, 1911, Louise Bourgeois spent her early years living on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in an apartment above her parents╒ tapestry gallery. In 1919 her family bought property south of Paris and set up a tapestry restoration workshop, where Louise helped her parents by completing the designs for damaged parts of tapestries; many depicted unclothed angels or goddesses, and ╥it was my job to fill that space╙ so that the nudity would not offend American collectors. Her most painful childhood memories involved her father, a charming womanizer who startled the family by having an affair with a ╥tutor╙ almost as young as his daughter; the episode inspired in her a bitter rage, fueled by betrayal and, she later said, by an almost murderous jealousy.She attended the LycÄe FÄnelon in Paris, where she studied mathematics, with a particular interest in geometry, and received her baccalaureate in 1932. She enrolled at the Sorbonne for graduate work in mathematics and philosophy, but she soon turned to art instead. Between 1934 to 1938 she took classes at several art schools, including the AcadÄmie des Beaux-Arts. During this time, she met and worked with cubist artist, Fernand LÄger, who kindled her interest in sculpture. She married American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved with him to New York City, where they had three sons. Her early work in the U.S. consisted of painting, drawings, and prints influenced by cubism and by her study of geometry. She exhibited in 1939 at the Brooklyn Museum and she had her first solo exhibition of 12 paintings in 1945 at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. In the 1940s she began producing painted wood sculptures of life-size abstract figures, which she often arranged in groups. She debuted as a sculptor at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, where she showed 17 such pieces, including The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947╨9. Her enduring interest in environmental sculpture is evidenced in these works and in works depicting abstract plant-like forms such as the Night Garden, 1953. In the 1960s she began sculpting in a variety of materials, including bronze, plaster, rubber and stone. Much of this later work was concerned with abstract organic forms that are rich with anatomical references and personal symbolism, as in Unconscious Landscape, 1967, and Partial Revolt, 1979. To many people such pieces proved profoundly disturbing, for they often employed images which, while abstract, suggested sexuality, violence, or both at once. On the other hand, her work was often seen as brazenly feminist, and in the 1980s her work exercised enormous influence over the development of a new generation of artists, particularly women.From 1950 until the late 1970s, she had only four solo sculpture shows; then, within three years (1978╨1981) she had seven more. A full-scale retrospective was presented at New York╒s Museum of Modern Art in November 1982, and a traveling exhibit of her work from 1982╨93 was mounted in 1994 to appear at the Brooklyn Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.During the 1970s, she held teaching positions at several schools, including The School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. She received several honorary degrees. During one ceremony, Yale╒s president Kingman Brewster spoke of her as one who has ╥not been afraid to disturb our complacency╙ and as one who ╥offered us powerful symbols of our experience and of the relations between man and woman.╙ The New York Times said ╥if one of the functions of art is to make trouble for the stuffed shirt, then that function could hardly have been better fulfilled than by Louise Bourgeois.╙ ╞styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ) !I 6 5¬ 7 !I ù 5¬ ÿ !I ü !I £ !I 1 !I = !I 9 !I N !I Z !I h !I
