Louise Bourgeois
(Paris 1911 – New York City 2010)
Couples (2001)
Signed l.r. and numbered 119/150 l.l.
Colour lithograph, 113.1 x 66.3 cm
Provenance:
Private collection, The Netherlands
N.B. I:
Published by Bermuda Editions to generate funds for Louise Bourgeois at the Hermitage, an exhibition wich was held at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in 2001.
N.B. II:
Louise Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris as the daughter of carpet makers. She was a French-American artist and sculptor. At the age of 12 Louise started helping her parents with repair work. At the age of fifteen she started studying mathematics at the University of Paris, the Sorbonne. Especially her study of geometry contributed to her early cubist drawings. Still looking for her own individual style she started painting and studied at the École du Louvre and subsequently at the École des Beaux Arts. She also worked as an assistent to Fernand Léger. In 1938 she and her American husband Robert Goldwater, an art critic, moved to New York City where she continued her studies at the renowned Art Students League of New York. Bourgeois started exhibiting sculptures and wooden figures from 1947 onward. One of the best-known works of that early period is The Winged Figure (1948). Despite her early success (one of her works was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art), Bourgeois was more or less ignored by the art market during the nineteen fifties and sixties. Only in the nineteen seventies, after the death of both her husband and her father, did she become a successful artist. In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. The artist lived and worked in New York City up to her death in May of 2010.