Unique
Presentation of the Artist’s Photographs and Diaries Accompanies Most
Comprehensive Examination to Date of Bourgeois’ Distinguished Career
Exhibition: A Life In Pictures: Louise Bourgeois
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Dates: June 27, 2008 – September 12, 2008
(NEW YORK, NY – June 23, 2008) – A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois, an exhibition of photographs, diaries, and ephemera from the artist’s personal archive,
is on view at the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum from June 27 through September 12, 2008. This biographical exhibition is unique to the Guggenheim’s presentation of the major retrospective Louise Bourgeois organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris,
which is on view in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and an adjacent
gallery from June 27 – September 28. A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois is organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Museum.
For Louise Bourgeois, art and life are inextricably linked. Although her complex, allusive work attains a universal significance, she has spoken of the autobiographical subtext that underpins her unique symbolic language. A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois offers
an opportunity to visually trace the personal narratives that have
informed the artist’s work throughout the past seven decades of her
extensive career. Born
in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in provincial France, assisting
with the family’s tapestry restoration business before immigrating to
New York in 1938. “Everything I do,” she has explained, “was inspired by my early life.” Viscerally present in her art is the psychic trauma of her
mother’s early death, her father’s betrayal of the family through his
10-year affair with their live-in English tutor, and her overlapping
roles of student, daughter, wife, mother and artist.
A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois
illuminates the artist’s rich life and career through a chronological
display of over 75 photographs taken by her family and by fellow
artists and friends such as Brassaï, Peter Moore, Inge Morath, and
Baird Jones. Snapshots of Bourgeois -- in France
as a child, in the studio among her iconic works, at home at her famed
Sunday salons, or in the company of great artists -- are shown
alongside her identification cards and passports. The artist’s original
diaries, which she has kept assiduously since 1923, offer poems,
sketches and daily musings, and often indicate the tensions between
rage, fear of abandonment, and guilt she has suffered since
childhood—tensions, however, that she has been able to channel and
release through her art. Included in the
presentation are 10 original invitations dating from 1945 to 1978,
announcing some of Bourgeois’s New York exhibitions. These
selections from the artist’s archive contextualize the more than 150
works on view in the accompanying retrospective, such as Bourgeois’s
early Femme Maison drawings and paintings of the
1940s, through the large-scale enclosed installations created in the
1990s known as Cells, to her more recent soft sculptures created from
stitched fabric.
The Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum
Opened to the public in fall of 2001, the Sackler Center for Arts Education serves as a dynamic 21st-century
education hub and learning laboratory that offers innovative public
programs in the visual, performing, and literary arts. Exploration and
experimentation with new technologies is the center’s hallmark, which
broadens and enriches programs for youth, adults, and families. Artists
as well as cultural and academic institutions are valued collaborative
partners. An 8,200-square-foot education facility, the Sackler Center
comprises Studio Art, Computer, and Multimedia Labs, the New Media
Theater, an exhibition gallery, the Resource Center, the Conference
Room, and education offices. It also includes the existing Peter B.
Lewis Theater, part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original architectural
design for the building.
Education Programs
A
full schedule of educational programs is being presented under the
auspices of the Sackler Center for Arts Education during the run of the
exhibition. For updated information regarding ticketed programs, contact the Box Office at 212 423 3587 or visit www.guggenheim.org/education.
Lectures and Panels
Patterns of Memory - Shapes of Anxiety
Tuesday, July 22, 6:30 PM
Professor Robert Storr, Dean, Yale School of Art offers this lecture on the rich career of Louise Bourgeois. For seventy years Louise Bourgeois has given form to the contradictions of existence at their most acute. Often
figurative but just as often abstract, a prone to radical mutations,
her work has seemed disparate to observers who have followed it only
episodically. Now, in retrospect, it has become
clear that it is knitted together by formal, thematic and emotional
threads that make it all of a piece. Tickets are $10 and $7 for members and students.
Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois
Tuesday, September 16, 6:30 PM
Linda Nochlin, Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, discusses
Louise Bourgeois’s “late style” within the context of the artist’s long
and distinguished career. Focusing on Bourgeois’s recent stuffed fabric
sculptures, Professor Nochlin contrasts this characteristic “soft”
production with the more architectonic sculptures dating from the same
period. Tickets are $10 and $7 for members and students.
Eye to Eye: Artist Led Tours of Louise Bourgeois
Various Dates, 6:30 PM
This
new series invites the public to join a multigenerational group of
leading contemporary artists on private guided tours that explore
Bourgeois’s distinctive iconography. Tours will
be offered by Nayland Blake, July 7; David Altmejd, July 14 and July
21; Karen Finley, July 28 and August 27; Rachel Harrison, September 8;
and Marina Abramoviæ, September 17. Receptions with the artist offering
the tour will follow. A single tour is $25 and $20 for members. Series of 3 is $60 and $50 for members. Limit 25 people per tour.
Film Screening
LOUISE BOURGEOIS: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine
Friday, September 26, 6:30 pm
Directed
by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, this new, long-awaited film about
the life and the work of the iconic Bourgeois celebrates her art and
her times through intimate conversations with the artist, archival
footage and exquisitely shot sequences of her art, filmed from 1992
through 2008. The screening will be followed by
a conversation with a circle of Bourgeois’s close friends, family and
art world luminaries, including her long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy;
Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, Guggenheim Museum; and Deborah Wye, Chief
Curator of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, Museum of
Modern Art; moderated by Amei Wallach. Tickets are $15 and $10 for members and students. Admission and Museum Hours: Entrance to A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois is free with museum admission: $18
adults, $15 students/seniors (65+), children under 12 free. Admission
includes audio guide. Saturday to Wednesday, 10 AM to 5:45 PM; Friday,
10 AM to 7:45 PM. Closed Thursday. On Friday evenings, beginning at
5:45 PM, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information
call, 212 423 3500, or visit www.guggenheim.org. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:
#1091
June 23, 2008
Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist
Claire Laporte, Associate, Media Relations
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
212 423 3840
E-mail: publicaffairs@guggenheim.org