52 Facts About Louise Bourgeois

Louise Josephine Bourgeois was a French-American artist.

Louise Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France.

Louise Bourgeois was the middle child of three born to parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois.

Louise Bourgeois's parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries.

Louise Bourgeois's mother died in 1932, while Bourgeois was studying mathematics.

Louise Bourgeois continued to study art by joining classes where translators were needed for English-speaking students, especially because translators were not charged tuition.

Louise Bourgeois took a job as a docent, leading tours at the Musee du Louvre.

Louise Bourgeois began studying art in Paris, first at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Ecole du Louvre, and after 1932 in the independent academies of Montparnasse and Montmartre such as Academie Colarossi, Academie Ranson, Academie Julian, Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and with Andre Lhote, Fernand Leger, Paul Colin and Cassandre.

Louise Bourgeois had a desire for first-hand experience and frequently visited studios in Paris, learning techniques from the artists and assisting with exhibitions.

Later Louise Bourgeois became disillusioned with the conception of patriarchal genius which dominated the art world, a change motivated in part by these masters' refusal to recognize women artists.

Louise Bourgeois settled in New York City with her husband in 1938.

Louise Bourgeois continued her education at the Art Students League of New York, studying painting under Vaclav Vytlacil, and producing sculptures and prints.

Louise Bourgeois incorporated those autobiographical references to her sculpture Quarantania I, on display in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1954, Louise Bourgeois joined the American Abstract Artists Group, with several contemporaries, among them Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.

Louise Bourgeois referred to her art as a series or sequence closely related to days and circumstances, describing her early work as the fear of falling which later transformed into the art of falling and the final evolution as the art of hanging in there.

Louise Bourgeois stated, "My work deals with problems that are pre-gender," she wrote.

In 1973, Louise Bourgeois started teaching at the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

From 1974 until 1977, Louise Bourgeois worked at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she taught printmaking and sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island.

Louise Bourgeois inspired many young students to make art that was feminist in nature.

Louise Bourgeois aligned herself with activists and became a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective founded by fellow artist Anita Steckel.

In 1978 Louise Bourgeois was commissioned by the General Services Administration to create Facets of the Sun, her first public sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois received her first retrospective in 1982, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Louise Bourgeois shared with the world that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, as a child, that her English governess was her father's mistress.

Between the years of 1984 and 1986, Louise Bourgeois created a series of sculptures all under the title Nature Study which continued her lifetime commitment of challenging patriarchal standards and traditional methods of femininity in art.

In 1989, Louise Bourgeois made a drypoint etching, Mud Lane, of the home she maintained in Stapleton, Staten Island, which she treated as a sculptural environment rather than a living space.

Louise Bourgeois had another retrospective in 1989 at Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany.

In 2010, the last year of her life, Louise Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender equality.

Louise Bourgeois created the piece I Do, depicting two flowers growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization Freedom to Marry.

Louise Bourgeois died of heart failure on 31 May 2010, at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

Wendy Williams, the managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio, announced her death.

Louise Bourgeois had continued to create artwork until her death, her last pieces being finished the week before.

Louise Bourgeois was survived by two sons, Alain Bourgeois and Jean-Louis Bourgeois.

Femme Maison is a series of paintings in which Louise Bourgeois explores the relationship of a woman and the home.

Louise Bourgeois is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself.

Louise Bourgeois was 70 years old and a mixed media artist who worked on paper and with metal, marble and animal skeletal bones.

Louise Bourgeois felt she could get in touch with issues of female identity, the body, and the fractured family long before the art world and society considered them as subjects to be expressed in art.

Louise Bourgeois's printmaking flourished during the early and late phases of her career: in the 1930s and 1940s, when she first came to New York from Paris, and then again starting in the 1980s, when her work began to receive wide recognition.

That period was followed by a long hiatus, as Louise Bourgeois turned her attention fully to sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois set up her old press, and added a second, while working closely with printers who came to her house to collaborate.

In 1990, Louise Bourgeois decided to donate the complete archive of her printed work to The Museum of Modern Art.

One theme of Louise Bourgeois's work is that of childhood trauma and hidden emotion.

Louise Bourgeois would bring mistresses back home and be unfaithful in front of his whole family.

Louise Bourgeois recalls her father saying "I love you" repeatedly to her mother, despite infidelity.

Louise Bourgeois considered her mother to be intellectual and methodical; the continued motif of the spider in her work often represents her mother.

Louise Bourgeois has explored the concept of feminity through challenging the patriarchal standards and making artwork about motherhood rather than showing women as muses or ideals.

Louise Bourgeois has been described as the 'reluctant hero of feminist art'.

Louise Bourgeois's work are very organic, biological, reproductive feel to them; they draw attention to the work itself.

Louise Bourgeois describes architecture as a visual expression of memory, or memory as a type of architecture.

Louise Bourgeois's work is powered by confessions, self-portraits, memories, fantasies of a restless being who is seeking through her sculpture a peace and an order which were missing throughout her childhood.

Louise Bourgeois did the water colors and Tracey Emin did the drawing on top.

In 2011 one of Louise Bourgeois's works, titled Spider, sold for $10.7 million, a new record price for the artist at auction, and the highest price paid for a work by a woman at the time.