Moynahan Studio: Friday #FemArt: Artist Louise Bourgeois

Friday, June 20, 2014

"I want to be both secretive and exhibitionist"

Her townhouse in New York was 13 feet wide.
Louise loved to sit by this window drawing and writing, watching the street.

What I loved learning about her from this article:

At 13ft wide, her townhouse in New York served as both her home and her studio.
Bourgeois moved there in 1962 when she was 51 years old.
She would die there almost half a century later at the age of 98.
Drawing, painting and sculpting since 1938, incredible success would come to her in the 1980s
“She was already 70,” says assistant and friend Jerry Gorovoy, “yet things were just beginning.”
Saving and re-using things came to characterise much of Louise’s life.
Louise filled her journals religiously, sometimes three times a day.
On a wall to wall pinboard in the town house hangs an exhibition poster that reads,‘Does feminism conflict with artistic standards?’
The Chelsea townhouse reminds Gorovoy of Louise and he sees her spirit there: "But when I see her, she’s always sitting in the back room with the window open, listening to the children in the schoolyard behind. She was like a child, in the end. An arrested child.”