Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Untititled (I have been to Hell and Back)

Image Record ID: 
aahi0009745
Work Title (display): 
Untititled (I have been to Hell and Back)
Image Title: 
full view
Work Dates (display): 
1996
Work Dates type: 
creation
Image Date (display): 
2012-04-24
Work Creator (display): 
Louise Bourgeois (American, born France, 1911-2010)
Work Creator gender: 
female
Work Creator notes (display): 
American sculptor, painter and printmaker of French birth. Her parents ran a workshop in Paris restoring tapestries, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn. She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to studio arts. In 1938, after marrying Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, critic and curator, she went to New York, where she enrolled in the Art Students League and studied painting for two years with Václav Vytlačil (b 1892). Bourgeois's work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum Print Exhibition in 1939. During World War II she worked with Joan Miró, André Masson and other European expatriates. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists—and, like them, drew from the unconscious—she never became an abstract artist. Instead, she created symbolic objects and drawings expressing themes of loneliness and conflict, frustration and vulnerability, as reflected in her suite of engravings and parables, He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947). In 1949 Bourgeois had her first sculpture exhibition, including Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle (1947–9; New York, Xavier Fourcade), at the Peridot Gallery; this work proved typical of her wooden sculpture and foreshadowed her preoccupations of the following years. Her first sculptures were narrow wooden pieces, such as Sleeping Figure (1950; New York, MOMA), a 'stick' figure articulated into four parts with two supporting poles. Bourgeois soon began using non-traditional media, with rough works in latex and plaster contrasting with her elegantly worked pieces in wood, bronze and marble. In the 1960s and 1970s her work became more sexually explicit, as in the Femme Couteau group (1969–70; King's Point, NY, J. and E. Spiegel priv. col.) and Cumul I (1969; Paris, Pompidou). The psychological origins of her work are particularly evident in Destruction of the Father (1974; New York, Xavier Fourcade). Bourgeois's work was appreciated by a wider public in the 1970s as a result of the change in attitudes wrought by feminism and Post-modernism. (Grove Art Online Accessed 2008-02-06)
Work Style Period: 
20th century
Work Subject: 
textiles
Work Subject: 
pain (sensation)
Work Subject: 
experience
Work Subject: 
quilts
Work Subject: 
despair
Work Subject: 
paper
Work Subject: 
text (document genre)
Work Subject: 
Hell
Work Subject: 
sewing (process)
Work Worktype: 
sculpture (visual works)
Work Category (VRC classification): 
textiles
Work Category (VRC classification): 
sculptures and installations
Work Material and Technique (display): 
mixed media sewn on fabric handkerchief
Work Measurements (display): 
49.5 cm (H) x 45.7 cm (W)
Work Location (Repository or Site) name: 
Collection Jerry Gorovoy
Work Location (Repository or Site) role: 
repository
Work Location (Geographic) name: 
New York (state)
Image Source Reproduction citation: 
Bourgeois, Louise, Gerald Matt, and Peter Weiermair. Louise Bourgeois: Aller-retour: Zeichnungen Und Skulpturen = Drawings and Sculptures. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2005. Print.
Image Source Reproduction refid: 
3-938821-19-1
Image Source Reproduction page number: 
145
Image Source Reproduction refid type: 
ISBN
Image Rights (display): 
unknown
Image Rights fair use checklist: 
1) use of this image is for education and educational research; 2) access is restricted to University of Colorado and Auraria Higher Education Center communities; 3) the original photographer is credited if known; 4) the image is published; 5) the amount of the work in relation to the whole is needed for education or educational research; 6) the number of derivatives is the minimum required for education or educational research; 7) the image has not been found to be reasonably available for sale; 8) duplication of the image does not violate preexisting contracts.
Work Rights (display): 
© Louise Bourgeois
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Holding Institution: 
University of Colorado at Boulder
Collection: 
Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection
Collection info and contact: 
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