Artist Louise Bourgeois has died today at the age of 98.
I was first introduced to her work just two years ago when my dear artist friend Chuck insisted I would love the retrospective at the Guggenheim. He was right. As I ascended its spiral path, I was transfixed again and again by the compelling, disturbing, sexual commentary coming off her sculpture and other pieces.
My favorite, called Femme Maison:
Then last year as a volunteer at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Designer House Tour on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I felt privileged to stand beside a piece of her sculpture in the home to which I’d been assigned. It was a breathtaking rendition of a woman’s torso.
“Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art … the first retrospective of a woman at the museum, secured her place as an influential figure,” writes Holland Cotter in The New York Times obituary. “Her reputation grew stronger in the context of the body-centered art of the ’90s, with its emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality.”
I am ever grateful to Chuck for opening my world a little wider.