Louise Bourgeois: PaintingsLouise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is celebrated today for her sculptures. Less known are the paintings she produced between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to three-dimensional media in 1949. Crucial to her artistic practice, these early works—the focus of this groundbreaking publication—show how Bourgeois evolved her deeply personal artistic lexicon, and how the themes and motifs she explored in her paintings coalesced into symbols of her sculptural practice. Informed by new archival research and the artist's extensive diaries, Louise Bourgeois: Paintings explores Bourgeois's relationship to the New York art world of the 1940s and her development of a unique pictorial language, adding a key element to our understanding of this crucial artist’s career. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION A Visual Lexicon of Displacement Clare Davies | 9 |
A DECADE OF PAINTING | 13 |
ENTER WITH CAUTION | 14 |
SEEING RED Briony | 23 |
PLATES | 33 |
CHRONOLOGY 1911 to 1953 | 139 |
Notes | 159 |
| 161 | |
List of Plates | 163 |
Acknowledgments | 167 |
| 169 | |
Photograph Credits | 171 |
Common terms and phrases
1949 Bourgeois 2022 Artists Rights Académie Adolph Gottlieb American Art André Breton Annual Exhibition Artists Rights Society Atelier 17 Bertha Schaefer Gallery Bilboquet Book of nine boulevard Saint-Germain Bourgeois participates Bourgeois studies Bourgeois's paintings canvas 36 canvas board chalk on canvas Chronology Complete Silence Connecticutiana Contemporary American Painting diaries Disappeared into Complete drawing East 18th Street Easton Foundation Ecole du Louvre engravings with letterpress Exhibition of Contemporary Fernand Léger French Grande-Chaumière Image Joséphine Le Cannet letterpress text Spread Louise Bourgeois Louvre Palace Mark Rothko Metropolitan Museum Modern Art modern painting modernist Museum of American Museum of Art Museum of Modern Natural History nine engravings Norlyst Gallery Oil on canvas Oil on linen painters Paris Peridot Peridot Gallery Photo Picasso Pierre Bonnard Placing a Beam Plate prints Private collection Robert Goldwater Roof Song Runaway Girl sculpture Self-Portrait solo exhibition Surrealist Swearing Allowed titled Untitled Woman in Process