The Women Who Made New York by Julie Scelfo & Hallie Heald

Author:Julie Scelfo & Hallie Heald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

In 1938, French artist LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911–2010) moved to New York where she, like Nevelson, studied at the Art Students League of New York. By the late 1940s and 1950s, her work appeared in solo shows in various New York galleries.

Her dark, sexually explicit subjects were rare for female artists in this era; later in life she revealed that her work was an effort to overcome the childhood trauma of learning about her father’s sexual infidelities with a governess who lived with her family.

Throughout the sixties, Bourgeois experimented with new materials, like latex, plaster, and rubber. With these she created hanging sculptures, like the provocative and biomorphic Fillette (1968), a dismembered yet erect penis that simultaneously references castration and a distorted female figure.

In the 1970s she became a voice for anti-censorship. She also began shaping the next generation of artists by teaching at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College, and The Cooper Union, as well as by holding weekly salons at her home in Chelsea, where she’d critique younger artists. (Her frank manner and dry sense of humor led students to name the gatherings “Sunday, bloody Sundays.”)

In 1982, when Bourgeois was seventy-one, she had her first retrospective at MoMA—only the second ever given to a female artist by that institution (the first was for Georgia O’Keeffe in 1946). She continued to work obsessively well into her nineties, playing with new shapes, like giant spiders, to explore themes of fear, anxiety, and sexual victimization. She died in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.

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