Influential sculptor Louise Bourgeois passes away

31 May 2010 - by ArtfixDaily Staff

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Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) Spider, 1997, bronze with dark polished patina, cast 1997 133 x 263 x 249 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection. Gift of the William T. Kemper Charitable Trust 1997.7.2

(Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art)

Paris-born American artist Louise Bourgeois passed away Monday at age 98 in New York City. She was creating artwork just last week, according to Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Dubbed the "the mother of American feminist identity art" by Robert Hughes in his book "American Visions," Bourgeois influenced generations of artists. She studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ecole du Louvre, Art Students League, and in the studio of sculptor Fernand Leger.

Bourgeois first became widely-known in her 70s when, in 1982, New York's Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo show.

In her seven-decade-long career, Bourgeois worked in a wide variety of mediums, focusing on themes of sexuality, femininity, and evoking a host of highly-charged emotions based largely on her childhood experience with a controlling, philandering father.

Among her memorable recent work was "Maman," ("or Mommy"), a giant sculpture of a 30-foot-tall spider with a basket of eggs and two little spiders by her side. Her 1997 bronze "Spider" (shown here) is in the collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. One of her "Spiders' brought $4.5 million at auction in 2008.

A retrospective of her career, beginning in the 1940s, traveled to the Tate Modern in London, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2007-08.

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