Born in Paris in 1911, she studied art at various schools - at the École du Louvre, the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrates to study engraving and painting at the Art Students League in New York City. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois turns towards sculpture, by composing groupings of abstract and organic shapes. By the 1960s she begins to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves become larger and more referential to what has … (read more)

Born in Paris in 1911, she studied art at various schools - at the École du Louvre, the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrates to study engraving and painting at the Art Students League in New York City. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois turns towards sculpture, by composing groupings of abstract and organic shapes. By the 1960s she begins to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves become larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work - her childhood and the relation she had with her father. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take - the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade - are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world and she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader of innovation in sculptural works.

She resides in New York and her work has recently gone around the world in a major retrospective show at the Modern Tate, the Musée National d’art moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

(courtesy of PBS)

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