An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Louis Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait" held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 24, 2017-January 28, 2018.
In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Featuring two series (25 works) by one of the most influential artists of recent decades Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Prints presents these highly personal and dreamlike expressions of this formidable creative force.Most of the French-American artist's work dealt with strongly autobiographical themes, invoking her childhood emotions of loneliness, desire, anxiety and jealousy.A prolific printmaker, Bourgeois' Autobiographical Series capture her deepest thoughts and memories, particularly in a suite of 14 etchings (from 1994).As a companion, the collection of 11 Drypoints (from 1999) offer a more abstract perspective, using metaphorical motifs and themes to conjure the dreams and images that haunted her to the very end of her life.Faithfully reproduced with arresting clarity, intriguing and highly immersive, both sets of prints open a window into the mind of the artist.Featuring two new texts: Roger Malbert provides an overview of the role that printmaking played in the artist's long career, while psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell explores themes of childhood trauma and sexuality.Published to accompany a touring exhibition across the UK and Ireland in 2015-16.
Celebrated for her singular contributions to 20th-century sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, installation and writing, French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois' (1911-2010) explorations of the human condition originated from her own lived experience. "My goal is to relive a past emotion," Bourgeois explained. "My art is an exorcism." Psychologically, emotionally and often sexually charged, Bourgeois' works intermingle the abstract and corporeal, the voluptuous and the distressing, to striking effect. Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment accompanies the first exhibition of the artist's work at Glenstone Museum, and features more than 30 major works drawn from the museum's collection. From her early wooden Personages to her large hanging sculptures, from suites of drawings and prints to textile works and her immersive Cells, To Unravel a Torment surveys Bourgeois' career through selected examples from her enormous body of work. Bourgeois was also a prolific writer, matching her sculptural language with reams of psychoanalytic musings on repression, symbolism and material. To Unravel a Torment also brings together never-before-published diary entries by the artist, annotated by Bourgeois scholar Philip Larratt-Smith, a contribution by art historian Briony Fer and an introduction by Emily Wei Rales, founder and director of Glenstone Museum.
"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois & Pablo Picasso: Anatomies of Desire, Hauser & Wirth Zèurich, June 9-September 14, 2019."
In his long career, Arthur Miller has charted some of the most hidden aspects of the American character, and made us recognize ourselves. With Homely Girl, A Life, he turns his attention to a smaller, more intimate, canvas, but one that in its deceptive delicacy still encompasses a vast range of human fears, ambitions, and desires. Janice—the eponymous homely girl—has hated her face ever since she was a child and her mother held up Ivory Snow advertisements to her, saying, "Now that is beauty." Homely she is, but also fiercely herself. Still,it is not until she falls in love with a blind musician that she feels her full nature unfold in this exquisite portrait of a woman finding a language to describe herself. Flanked by two stories also set in Manhattan, "Fame" and "Fitter's Night," Homely Girl, A Life pays homage to a city constantly reinventing itself—and to the classic Miller themes of work, honor, and identity. "Chekhovian . . . deserves praising to the top of the highest skyscraper for its humanity, wit, depth" —A.N. Wilson