Louise Bourgeois

UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2003)

Concurrently, Bourgeois began to explore her sexual psyche through similar forms. Unlike her Femme Maison of ca. 1947 (Boston: Barbara Krakow Gallery), Femme Maison 81 (New York: private collection) is no longer a surreal exposé of a female whose head is replaced with her home. It is a series of phallic totems growing in various directions. Her bronze 1984 Spiral Woman (New York: Dannheisser Collection) is a legged phallic symbol wrapped in a thick boa-like coil. Fillette (1968, New York: private collection), an erect uncircumcised penis, and Fragile Goddess (ca. 1970, New York: private collection), a headless and limbless female shape with protruding breasts and belly, are perhaps the most sexually explicit works of the artist's mature years. They relate to the aggressiveness and helplessness of the masculine female.

In 1994 she displayed The Red Rooms at Peter Blum's in New York. The work consists of two bedrooms representing parent and child respectively. The rooms, drenched in red and rife with symbolic furnishings, typify her highly personal themes. The Red Rooms is intended to expose moods from her childhood. Her spider drawings, The Nest, symbolic of the well-nurtured family, were seen in that same year at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent.

Bourgeois taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island, as well as at Brooklyn College and the Pratt Institute. She was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982 and at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Múller in Otterlo, The Netherlands, in 1991. Although Bourgeois will forever be immortalized through a Mapplethorpe portrait of the artist with Fillette in her arms, her oeuvre will exemplify the variety of artistic expressions among 20th-century American sculptors.