Louise Bourgeois »

Marie-Laure Bernadac was curator of the Musée Picasso in Paris, from 1980-1992. She is head curator of the Cabinet des Arts Graphiques du Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She has written Louise Bourgeois (Flammarion, 1996) and contributed to numerous books on Louise Bourgeois, Picasso, Annette Messager, and Miro. The innovative Paris-based design team M/M created the unique typefaces and the hole-punch series design for the Flammarion Contemporary books.

This French-born artist emigrated to the United States in 1938. Bourgeois has produced a body of work that spans more than five decades, including over 25 worldwide exhibitions in 2005 alone. Famous for her highly experimental and autobiographical sculptures, Bourgeois's work also includes intimate drawings, paintings, and personal writings. She is a pioneer in tackling issues of empowerment, sexuality, and the roles of women in her diverse oeuvre. Her art can be found in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. In 1993, Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennial. Louise Bourgeois presents the artist's long and productive career through a series of essays: a retrospective text, an interview, an analysis, and over 150 images that represent the totality of the artist's output from her earliest work to her most recent projects. This comprehensive volume with its innovative design pays tribute to an original and influential artist and is an essential addition to every contemporary art-lover's collection.

Publishers Weekly

French-born Bourgeois emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, yet the nearly 60 years of adventurous work in sculpture, drawing, engraving and installation reproduced here reflects an admitted attempt to repair the childhood she escaped. In 150 illustrations (50 in color), we find a haunting, enigmatic exploration of sexuality and the home: ladders that lead only to the ceiling; a giant steel spider whose egg sac is a jar of blue fluid; arrays of abstract white marble forms that simultaneously suggest male and female genitalia, often placed in enclosed, almost soothing, roomlike settings. Bernadac, curator of graphic arts at the Paris Muse National d'art Moderne, treats Bourgeois's uncanny mix of domestic comforts and erotic terrors as pointing to the ultimate imbrication of our desires into the structures we create, formal or familial. Her interpretations, while sometimes didactic and often overshadowed by the artist's own commentary, provide a welcome chronological overview of this remarkable and still evolving career. (June)