5 Essential Facts About Louise Bourgeois
The Paris-born artist saw much success in the art world, thanks to her masterful skills as a sculptor
Nobody has created haunting sculptures of spiders quite like French artist Louise Bourgeois. The Paris-born artist saw much success in the art world, thanks to her masterful skills as a sculptor. Bourgeois moved to New York City in the early 1940s, taught art at the city’s acclaimed universities in the 1970s, and befriended notable art world figures like Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Peggy Guggenheim, who included her in “The Women” group show alongside other notable women artists.
Bourgeois’s artwork was largely classified as feminist art, but she rejected the idea, claiming it was universal subject matter, even though one painting from her “Femme Maison” series graced the cover of a legendary feminist book by Lucy Lippard in 1976. Bourgeois’s mother died when she was just 21, and some of her most poignant artworks honor her late mother. Here are five essential facts about the legendary sculptor.
1. She Created the First Piece of Installation Art
In 1949, Bourgeois had her first solo exhibition at Peridot Gallery in New York City, showing her work from 1947 to 1949. Rather than arranging her sculptures on pedestals, she put them on the floor. It created a welcoming experience where guests could weave between sculptures, like an installation of 17 sculptures as one artwork. The term “installation art” wasn’t used until the 1960s, but Bourgeois was a forebearer of it, and later made her room-sized “Cells” series of art installations.
2. Bourgeois was the First Woman Artist to Have a Retrospective at the MoMA
In 1982, Bourgeois had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She was 70 years old, but it was this exhibition that helped her gain global notoriety. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 1997. She received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2001, she created an installation for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. In 2008, she received the French Legion of Honor.
3. She Used Metaphors to Shed Light on Her Upbringing
She cited her father’s infidelity in The Destruction of the Father installation in 1974, while her artwork The Spider refers to her late mother, who died of Spanish influenza in 1932, and was a weaver and seamstress who ran a tapestry shop, using a spider as a metaphor for her mother’s livelihood. She also created textile-based collages and art books bound in fabric.
4. She Became An Icon Of Feminist Art
Using the female experience as a primary focus for her artwork, Bourgeois is remembered as a trailblazer of feminist art. She insisted her artwork dealt with “feminist subject matter,” but it inspired a generation of women artists who followed her. She addressed domestic control in her “Femme Maison” series, used the phallus as a basis for her Fillette sculpture, and, for her most famous artwork, Maman in 1999, she created a 30-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a spider with marble eggs as a tribute to maternal power and protection.
5. She Broke Market Records With Her Sculpture
In 2019, nine years after Bourgeois’s death at age 98, her Spider sculpture sold for $32 million at Christie’s. It marked one of the top-grossing sales for a female artist at auction. The sculpture stands at 10 feet high and weighs over 1,500 pounds, with each spider leg weighing 150 pounds each. In 2023, the sculpture again set a record when it sold for $32.8 million at Sotheby’s.