TRACES:Louise Bourgeois

If the great artist was living, today she would have closed 104. She passed away in 2010, full of days, having completed a circle of life and work. She is the first international artist, with which we inaugurate our new column “Traces”. This column is a tribute to very important artists, living or dead, who have left their trace in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

The French sculptor Louise Bourgeois , who moved to America two years, after she met (1938) her husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater, who influenced the course and evolution of her work. Although she worked hard till the end of her life making sculptures, installations, drawings and gouaches, looks like she not ever overcame the trauma of her child age, her father cheating on her mother, as she dealt almost obsessed with these issues not forgiving neither the passivity of her mother, since she has devoted to her a series of artworks. However, she was particularly combative, and hated the standard of powerless woman. For that reason, when the Abstract Expressionists, who joined them in 1954, talked to exclude from the Movement: Women, Blacks and Gays (Abstract Expressionism and Other Politics, Yale University Press Editions), Louis Bourgeois, erected her fist and hit with momentum and anger the table, claiming the right of all the above to be acceptable in the movement and it looks that she succeeded. These separations inappropriate nowadays, were previously almost self-explanatory (!). However, such thoughts, beliefs and prejudices would cost much in Contemporary Art.

*Two of her significant moments, the last words of each artist are: the great retrospective in Documenta 9 and the Grand Prize-the Golden Lion, in the Venice Biennale of 1999.