Hasta La Ideas

The artist in a 2001 production still from Art:21

French-born artist Louise Bourgeois, whose career ran parallel to avant-garde movements ranging from Surrealism to Post-Minimalism, died of a heart attack yesterday in New York City. She was 98. Best known for her emotionally-charged sculptures in wood, marble, metal, plaster, and latex, Bourgeois leaves behind a diverse body of work that includes drawings, paintings, and “Cells,” the haunting room-sized installations that she assembled throughout the 1990s. Her parents, who repaired and sold tapestries for a living, unwittingly demonstrated to her that artists could be useful—in ways that would come to resonate throughout her work. “If you look at the tapestries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are genitals everywhere. And the American puritanical attitude absolutely forbid that,” Bourgeois told Ingrid Sischy in a 1997 interview for Interview. “So one of my mother’s duties was to cut them out and put a bunch of flowers there, so it would not offend the moralities of the collectors.” She had no interest in fitting in with the movement of the moment, including Surrealism. “Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy,” said Bourgeois, whose profoundly personal work put her in a class by herself. “I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.”

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