Louise Bourgeois
Spiders, cells and fabric figures, from an artist who was seventy before the world caught up.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 into a family of tapestry restorers, studied mathematics before art, and moved to New York in 1938. She worked for four decades in comparative obscurity and was seventy-one when the Museum of Modern Art gave her the retrospective that changed everything. The work returns constantly to her own childhood — her father's affair with the family's live-in English tutor, her mother's illness, the repair of tapestries — through the Cells, room-sized enclosures of found furniture and objects; through fabric figures sewn from her own clothes; and through Maman, the thirty-foot bronze spider that stands for the mother as weaver and protector. She worked until her death in 2010, at ninety-eight.
Maman and the other spiders exist in editions at several scales, and identifying scale, cast number and foundry is where a valuation begins. The fabric works of the last two decades are unique and are the most fragile part of the output — textile condition, light exposure and any prior conservation are decisive. She was also an exceptionally prolific printmaker, particularly in her final years, working with Wingate Studio and others; the Easton Foundation maintains the catalogue of that graphic work.
If you own a work by Louise Bourgeois
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.