Art Metropole

#05551

Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed Psychoanalytic Writings

Artist

Louise Bourgeois

Date

2012

Publisher

Violette Editions

Format

Artists' Books

Details

Hardcover

ISBN

9781900828376

Size

20 × 26.5 × 5 cm

Length

500 

Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith. Text by Louise Bourgeois, Elisabeth Bronfen, Donald Kuspit, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Paul Verhaeghe with Julie de Ganck, Meg Harris Williams.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) invented a new kind of language for sculpture—a language that was essentially psychoanalytic, uniquely capable of expressing oedipal struggle, ominous forces of repression, sexual symbolism and material uncanniness. Famed for some of the twentieth century’s most enduring works, such as “The Destruction of the Father” (1974), “Arch of Hysteria” (1993) and “Maman” (1999), Bourgeois also disseminated her influence through her writings, collected in the 1998 volume Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings 1927–1997—originally published by Robert Violette, also the publisher of this new deluxe writings-cum-monograph two-volume set. Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed highlights the enduring presence of psychoanalysis as a motivational force and a site of exploration in the artist’s life and work. Selected and edited by Philip Larratt-Smith (Bourgeois’ literary archivist), and contextualized with eight extensive scholarly essays, this collection of approximately 80 previously unpublished writings spans some six decades of the artist’s production. The second volume in this gorgeous slipcased set is an impressive, up-to-date Bourgeois monograph that details works made right up until the artist’s death in 2010. Together, the two volumes comprise the most complete portrait of the life, work and thought of this seminal figure.