Louise Bourgeois: An Interview

Louise Bourgeois has utilized wood, metal, plaster, and bronze in creating her sculptures. Among the many themes in her work are the house (or lair) and the so-called “toi-et-moi” or “you and me.” Both of these subjects derive from a self-defined problem in Bourgeois’s life, the desire to find and express a means of getting along with other people. For Bourgeois, the relationship of one person to another is all-important, and life has little meaning without it. Louise Bourgeois’s remarkable career spans both the modern and postmodern eras. Her early sculptures are pioneering examples of American surrealism; her later explorations of the body and of feminine identity ushered in a new sensibility, one that has profoundly shaped contemporary art.

In this interview, Bourgeois takes account of moments in her life and work in her distinctively elliptical/precise form of expression, e.g. the enduring influence of her chaotic and neglectful father (whom she and her mother followed from camp to camp during World War I), her job completing the figures in tattered antique tapestries as a girl, and her intense engagement with geometry at the Sorbonne. Bourgeois describes the violence of her relationship with the surrealists in the 1940s. The older generation of expatriate French artists dominated New York scene, setting the stage for Louise Bourgeois’s intense, antagonistic—and very close—relationship with the older French (vigorously and without exception male) artists. Louise Bourgeois discusses her working process, the relationship an artist must have to her work in order to survive, the secondary place of materials in sculpture, art’s sociability and the emotional privilege of the artist. Bourgeois’s family history is filled with strong women, which influenced her feminism. Commenting on the “Feminist Aesthetic,” Louise Bourgeois describes her own solutions to the universally familiar female problems in society, including her oscillating acceptance of the vacuum of female sculpture, and the importance of forgetting over desire.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1974 and re-edited in 2002.