Louise Bourgeois

The french-born American artist Louise Bourgeois passed away at Beth Israel Hospital on Monday, Mai 30th. Born in 1911, this woman who has been living in the United States since 1938 is the very illustration of the long-term results of an artistic approach. This sculptor and plastic artist who was close to Marcel Duchamp and trained under Fernand Léger at the School of Fine Arts only gained recognition in the 1970s. Her sculptures, encompassing themes relating to reproduction, birth and motherhood, evoke a claustrophobic and surgical universe that prefigure Cronenberg’s films. They are woman-houses, busts in brick and rib cages in the shape of staircases climbed by insects and phallus figures in a dazzling form of Freudian trauma. “My best friend was my mother. She was as intelligent, patient, clean and useful, reasonable and indispensable as a spider”, read the texts accompanying a first retrospective devoted to her at the Pompidou Centre in spring 2008. The impressive cast-iron spider displayed in front of the Tate Modern in London, looking as though it is about to jump into the Thames, is by Louise Bourgeois. At 98 years old : one of the most talked-about contemporary artists.

September 21, 2008. Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the Légion d’honneur to Louise Bourgeois in her New York studio.