Louise Bourgeois

Depicts drawings by an artist better known for her sculpture, and features interviews and comments by the artist

This first collection of writings by artist Louise Bourgeois is both intellectually rich and psychologically revealing."Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor." Beginning at the age of twelve, the internationally renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois both wrote and drew, first a diary precisely recounting the everyday events of her family life, then notes and reflections. Destruction of the Father (the title comes from the name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in 1973) contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images. Writing is a means of expression that gained increasing importance for Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing is compulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by her intellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense of literary form. (She frequently published articles on artists, exhibitions, and art events.) Bourgeois, a private woman "without secrets," gave numerous interviews to journalists, artists, and writers, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hidden meanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumas of her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative process.

Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she has committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs inspiring her work. "The Insomnia Drawings" show the artist's mind at drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the hustle-bustle of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman's life and beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor. As soon as the artist agreed to entrust "The Insomnia Drawings" to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Louise Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places "The Insomnia Drawings" in context of Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois' imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. Furthermore, the second volume offers a chronology and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. This landmark publication is a must for everyone wanting to take part in the imaginative journeys of one of today's most important artists. "The Insomnia Drawings" are part of the Daros Collection. 13 x 10.25 inches, 220 illustrations. Author "She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while here sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions-between plentitude and lack, proximity and absence, agreement and contradiction." -Elisabeth Bronfen "L'art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / Art / est le / contraire / du acting. Les paysages de nuit on / envahi les jours. Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it can be worse / / M is for mother / in the water / it is subject / to change / or even to reversal." -Louise Bourgeois

Examines the sculptor's feminist and subversive works that often mingle human and animal forms

Entre 2007 et 2010, dans ce qui devait être un ultime retour vers le travail de la broderie et du tissage qui avait été le sien dans sa jeunesse, Louise Bourgeois imagina seize petits panneaux en hommage à la pâle héroïne de Balzac. Torchons et mouchoirs, parfois élimés, pliés dans les armoires depuis son départ aux États-Unis en 1938, agrémentés de perles, de boutons, d'épingles, de fleurs, de tissus, de strass, reliquaires évoquant le temps qui passe, la minutie des herbiers et l'humilité des ouvrages de dames. L'écho entre mythe littéraire et légende familiale - source d'inspiration essentielle de l'art de Louise Bourgeois - s'impose d'évidence, comme le souligne Jean Frémon, qui fut un familier de l'artiste, dans son essai introductif. Père froid et distant, mère effacée, fille sacrifiée : Eugénie Grandet est aux yeux de l'artiste "le prototype de la femme qui ne s'est pas réalisée. Elle est dans l'indisponibilité de s'épanouir (...), prisonnière de son père qui avait besoin d'une bonne. Son destin est celui d'une femme qui n'a jamais l'occasion d'être une femme". Faussement désuètes, parodiquement appliquées, subtilement ironiques, ces seize compositions qui évoquent la solitude, le vieillissement, la frustration, l'effacement offrent aussi une célébration de la patience féminine, dans tous les sens de l'expression.

The sculptor Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and studied painting with Ferdinand Légér among others. As one of the most important artists of the 20th century, she lived and worked in New York since her emigration in 1938. Her extensive and challenging work, which includes innumerable drawings as well as several paintings, is now recognized worldwide after decades of obscurity.In the interview that Christiane Meyer-Thoss conducted with the artist in New York in 1986 and 1989, she gives personal insights into her work.Christiane Meyer-Thoss, born in 1956, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main as an author, lecturer and editor. Since 1981 she has written extensively on contemporary art and literature, most prominently on Meret Oppenheim. The book "Louise Bourgeois. Designing for Free Fall" from which this interview is taken was published by Ink Press in 2016.

Over the past intensely productive decade, Louise Bourgeois's drawings have been dominated by diary-like work in which text and sign often mix. This extensive compendium of that work and its antecedents shares a series design with her recent book of sculpture, and the dialogue between mediums is lively in both titles, which also share a determination to put Bourgeois's current work in the context of her oeuvre, not just her work in other mediums but her work of other eras. Long denied due recognition, Bourgeois became an avant-garde superstar late in life, and is today, at 94, considered "a great figure of the postmodern" (Peter Weiermair). Since the 1980s, her work has followed the prevalent notion of art that rejects universal style and formal understanding in favor of a personal approach. Her central concern lies in establishing an intense, open discussion on the dialectics of thoughts and feelings, on the internal conflict wrought by external relationships. Here, some 150 works are grouped thematically around motifs such as "rivers," "spiders" and "proverbs/aper¡us." A separate retrospective section of older works allows the rest of the book to shift toward the present, which is full of dark and dervish-like activity. Of her prominence, Bourgeois has said, "My luck was that I became famous so late that fame could not destroy me." On the contrary, readers will agree that fame--or is it time?--has invigorated and animated Bourgeois to an exceptional degree.

Hauser & Wirth is proud to present Do Not Abandon Me , a collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin consisting of sixteen intimate works made over the past two years. These drawings articulate physical drives and feelings, candidly confronting themes of identity, sexuality and the fear of loss and abandonment through joint expression. Do Not Abandon Me originated with Bourgeois, who began the works by painting male and female torsos in profile on paper, mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate and fluid silhouettes. Bourgeois then passed the images on to Emin, who later confessed: I carried the images around the world with me from Australia to France, but I was too scared to touch them . Emin overlaid Bourgeois s forms with fantasy, drawing smaller figures that engaged with the torsos like Lilliputian lovers, enacting the body s desires and anxieties. In one, a woman kisses an erect phallus; in another, a small fetus-like form protrudes from a swollen belly. In many, Emin s handwriting inscribes the images with a narrative, putting into words the emotions expressed in Bourgeois s vibrant gouaches. This suite of prints was one of the last projects Louise Bourgeois completed before her death. They were then printed at Dye-namix studio in New York with archival dyes on cloth in an edition of 18 sets with 6 artist proofs. The exhibition travels to Hauser & Wirth from Carolina Nitsch Project Room, New York, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Notwithstanding their considerable differences and individuality--one would hardly expect them to have a lover in common--Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon share an artistic intent to explore eroticism and sexuality. Each artist deals, in his or her own stylistic way, with the intense physical states of ecstasy, passion, conflict and fear. Working through the medium of drawing--the "medium of the mind"--they trace themselves, scribing pictorial metaphors of an alternately tender, aggressive, attached, forceful and even erotic confrontation with the material. Creativity, itself never free from conflict, undresses itself in drawings that touch on obsession, desire and the pleasures of eroticism. (In Search of) The Perfect Lover groups together extensive works on paper from the Hauser and Wirth Collections, complemented by a selection of sculptures. Accompanying texts embrace the connections between body, eroticism, sexuality and creativity, as well as the potential conflicts embedded in each artist's work.

Produced in New York in 1947, He Disappeared into Complete Silence signifies Louise Bourgeois’s indepence and personal growth — it reflects her departure from painting and marks her independent stylistic identity in the postwar milieu. Consisting of nine parables and nine engravings, the work creates a universe in which eternal loneliness converges with absurdity and miscommunication, but never with resignation. The parables and etchings articulate witty tragedies from everyday life, to form what could be described as a fragile metaphysics of the human condition.

Louise Bourgeois, dont l'œuvre est longtemps restée méconnue, est aujourd'hui considérée internationalement comme l'une des artistes essentielles du XXe siècle. Née à Paris en 1911, elle s'installa à New York en 1938 et commença à y exposer son travail peu après. Halle fut en 1982 la première artiste Femme à faire l'objet d'une rétrospective au Museum of Modern Art de New York, puis, en 1993, représenta les Etats-Unis à la Biennale de Venise. En 1995, elle fit l'objet d'une exposition rétrospective au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris et ses dessins furent présentés au Centre Pompidou. En 2000, une grande installation de l'artiste dans le hall de la Tate Modern marqua l'ouverture à Londres de celte institution de l'art contemporain. Dessinatrice et surtout sculpteur, Louise Bourgeois use de matériaux divers : marbre, bronze, latex, tissu, miroirs... Ses installations, qui réunissent sculptures et objets trouvés, traitent de thèmes intimes liés à l'enfance, aux relations familiales, à la violence des relations entre les sexes. Élaboré en étroite collaboration avec l'artiste et accompagnant une exposition rétrospective itinérante, cet ouvrage offre un panorama complet de la carrière de Louise Bourgeois. Conçu comme un glossaire illustré, il permet d'approfondir ses thématiques récurrentes, de A comme Abandon à V comme Vêlement en passant par F (Famille, Figures paternelles, Féminisme) et S (Sexualité, Suicide). L'ouvrage réunit les contributions de figures majeures de la littérature et de la culture internationales, et une sélection d'écrits de Louise Bourgeois. Il s'agit de la publication la plus exhaustive et actualisée sur l'artiste.

LOTS OF INFORMATION AND IMAGES. GREAT REFERENCE FOR COLLECTORS, DEALERS AND HISTORIANS. BE SURE TO EMAIL US IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. HAPPY BIDDING!

Born in France, Gaston Lachaise (1882 - 1935) moved to the United States in 1906 and later became one of the country's leading modern sculptors.

Diverse Observations is a groundbreaking book available for the first time in English. Written by a midwife committed to improving the care of women and newborns, it records the evolution of Bourgeois’s practice and beliefs, comments on changing attitudes related to reproductive health, and critiques the gendered elitism of the early modern medical hierarchy

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