Louise Bourgeois
(French-American, 1911-2010)
Untitled (I Have Been to Hell and Back), 2007
Embroidered handkerchief
11.75 x 11.75 in.
Gift of Charlotte and Alan Artus
Bourgeois explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career, including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, and death and the unconscious. Her brooding works were culled from childhood memories as well as psychological analyses of sexuality, pain, and fear. In the embroidery on handkerchief seen here, the text “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful” challenges stereotypical and gendered associations with the medium. An example of her characteristically sardonic wit, the embroidered message also conveys a sense of hope in a bleak time.
Biography
Bourgeois first studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before pursuing art. She studied under Fernand Léger at the École des Beaux-Arts and later. Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938, after marrying art historian Robert Goldwater, where she studied with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League of New York. Largely underappreciated during her early career, she garnered critical and public acclaim after her retrospective, at age 70, at the Museum of Modern Art, the museum’s first devoted to a woman artist. Others have since been organized by the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; and the Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Bourgeois represented the U.S. at the 1993 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion. Other honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington D.C, and, in 2008, the French Legion of Honor medal presented by President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Bourgeois died in New York in 2010, age 98.
