The sculptor Louise Bourgeois is best known for her monumental abstract sculptures, one of the most striking of which is the installation Spider (1997). Too vast in scale to be viewed all at once, this elusive structure resists simple narration. It fits both no genre and all of them—architecture, sculpture, installation. Its contents and associations evoke social issues without being reducible to any one of them. Here, literary critic and theorist Mieke Bal presents the work as a theoretical object, one that can teach us how to think, speak, and write about art. Known for her commentary on the issue of temporality in art, Bal argues that art must be understood in relationship to the present time of viewing as opposed to the less-immediate contexts of what has preceded the viewing, such as the historical past of influences and art movements, biography and interpretation. In ten short chapters, or "takes," Bal demonstrates that the closer the engagement with the work of art, the more adequate the result of the analysis. She also confronts issues of biography and autobiography—key themes in Bourgeois's work—and evaluates the consequences of "ahistorical" experiences for art criticism, drawing on diverse sources such as Bernini and Benjamin, Homer and Eisenstein. This short, beautiful book offers both a theoretical model for analyzing art "out of context" and a meditation on a key work by one of the most engaging artists of our era.

Award-winning creators, Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault, present a picture book biography of a beloved artist in Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, Maman, stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise’s own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois’s childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works. With a beautifully nuanced and poetic story, this book stunningly captures the relationship between mother and daughter and illuminates how memories are woven into us all. “With evocative, gorgeous illustrations and an inspirational story of an artist not often covered in children’s literature, this arresting volume is an excellent addition to nonfiction picture book collections, particularly those lacking titles about women artists.” —Booklist, starred review

Louise Bourgeois' tapestry and needlepoint work deals with reparation in both a literal and metaphorical sense. In many of the works, fragmented tapestries are pieced together and repaired to create new sculptural forms. The recurring practices of weaving, stitching and mending express Bourgeois' identification with her childhood and the family business of tapestry restoration. Coupled with the medium of tapestry, Bourgeois' recurring motif of the spider symbolizes her mother, a weaver, and fully explores the complex relationship between mother and child. This publication includes archival photographs and facsimile documents from the Bourgeois family archive, as well as excerpts from the artist's psychoanalytical writings.

Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.

Whether located in the heart of a metropolis such as Chicago or on sprawling fields in the countryside, sculpture parks and gardens have become increasingly popular destinations for art and nature lovers alike. These art parks offer visitors a unique opportunity to interact with large-scale works designed for quiet contemplation in natural landscapes. Art Parks is the first comprehensive guide to North America's most important outdoor sculpture parks. Parks are divided into chapters thematically and by region, with four maps that locate parks within each geographic area. Each of the fifty-seven locations—from large-scale parks in the countryside to small urban gardens and corporate sculpture collections—is described in detail and beautifully photographed. With its handy flexibind format, it is equally at home in the traveler's backpack or on the sculpture lover's side table.

An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Louis Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait" held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 24, 2017-January 28, 2018.

A rare glimpse inside the private world of Louise Bourgeois, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. "Readers who already love the artist will be thrilled by the richness of this book, and those who didn't know her work before will discover a complex, brilliant, and deeply emotional artist who used her creative gifts to reshape the world around her." – Architectural Digest "Bound in soft sky–blue linen cloth and full of suggestive photography, the pleasure begins when the book is first held, its heft and weight, the mix of textures and fonts suggest something to be savored, then saved." – New York Journal of Books Louise Bourgeois was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and photographer Jean–François Jaussaud met her for the first time in 1994 at her studio in Brooklyn. But it was not before she had interrogated him about every aspect of his life that he earned her trust. A rare photo session was set up in Spring 1995, under one condition: she would destroy the photographs if she didn't like them… Jaussaud agreed to it and passed the test. He was then given carte blanche to photograph her studio and her house in Chelsea, and he kept coming back for another eleven years. Jaussaud's photographs of Louise Bourgeois in her house and studio are a moving testimony showing how completely implicated in her work she was, to the point that her private life and her work were inextricably interwoven. Louise Bourgeois: An Intimate Portrait also contains: •Extracts from Bourgeois' diary • Personal notes • Short texts from Jaussaud, Marie–Laure Bernadac, and Xavier Girard. This is a must–have addition to any serious admirer of Louise Bourgeois as well as a fascinating entry point for those just discovering her groundbreaking explorations of the family, sexuality, bodies, death, and the unconscious.