Early Life

Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France. In 1930, Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry. In 1935, she began studying art in Paris, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and École du Louvre , and after 1932 in the independant academies of Montparnasse and Montmartre.

Bourgeois met her husband Robert Goldwater in 1938. They emigrated to New York City. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League of New York, studying painting under Vaclav Vytlacil, and also producing sculptures and prints.

In 1939, Bourgeois and Goldwater adopted a French child, Michel. In 1940, she gave birth to another son, Jean-Louis, and in 1941, she gave birth to Alain.

Middle Years

For Bourgeois the early 1940s represented the difficulties of a transition to a new country and the struggle to enter the exhibition world of New York City. In 1954, Bourgeois joined the American Abstract Artists Group, with several contemporaries, among them Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. At this time she also befriended the artists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. In 1958, Bourgeois and her husband moved to Manhattan, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Despite the fact that she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Borgeois’ subject was the feminine. She has been quoted to say "My work deals with problems that are pre-gender," she wrote. "For example, jealousy is not male or female."

Later Life

In 1973, Bourgeois started teaching at the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Bourgeois aligned herself with activists and became a member of the Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective founded by fellow artist Anita Steckel.

Bourgeois received her first retrospective in 1982, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In an interview with Artforum, timed to coincide with the opening of her retrospective, she revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was wholly autobiographical. She shared with the world that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, as a child, that her English governess was also her father’s mistress.

In 2010, in the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. Bourgeois has said “Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing.”

Death

Bourgeois died of heart failure on 31 May 2010, in Manhattan. She had continued to create artwork until her death. The New York Times said that her work “shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.”