Louise Bourgeois: Paintings

- Blurb -

An unprecedented look at the little-known paintings from Louise Bourgeois' s early years in New York that laid the groundwork for her sculptural practice Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is celebrated today for her sculptures. Less known-and the focus of this publication-is the body of paintings produced by the artist 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-rarely seen or exhibited-show Bourgeois' s deeply personal artistic lexicon. Themes and motifs explored in her paintings coalesced into those that she would continue to mine during her decades-long career: the clock, the spiral, the Femme Maison (a woman' s body with a house for a head), and the columnar figures that heralded her totemic Personage sculptures. Informed by new archival research and the artist' s extensive diaries, the book' s essays and illustrated chronology explore Bourgeois' s relationship to the New York art world of the 1940s-transformed by the arrival of European Surrealists and the emergence of the New York School-and her development of a pictorial language combining abstraction, figuration, and storytelling.