Louise Bourgeois (1) (1911–2010)

Louise Bourgeois was the middle of three children born to well-to-do parents who owned a Parisian antiques gallery. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Louise sometimes was allowed to draw in missing fragments of the designs. The death of her mother, an invalid, in 1932 inspired Louise to abandon her study of mathematics and to begin studying art. Because her father would not support her, she found classes that needed translators for English-speaking students. In one of these, she met Fernand Léger, who told her she should be a sculptor, not a painter. Louise Bourgeois graduated from the Sorbonne in 1935, and continued to study art at various schools, such as the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1938, she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian and professor, and moved with him to New York City, where Goldwater taught at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Louise Bourgeois attended classes at the Art Students League of New York. In 1939, she and her husband briefly returned to France to adopt a son, and she subsequently gave birth to two more sons. Much of Louise Bourgeois's work evoked her troubled past and the abuse she suffered from her father. She befriended other artists such as Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. As a member of the American Abstract Artists Group, she made the transition from upright scultures made of wood to more complex figures in marble, plaster, bronze, steel, and stone. In 1973, she began teaching at Columbia University, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, and Yale University, among others. She also taught for many years in the public schools in Great Neck, Long Island. In 1982, in her early '70s, Louise Bourgeois received a major retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, which gained her the fame and professional success that had long eluded her. She received an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1993.