Louise Bourgeois is best known for her monumental sculptures, installations, drawings, and paintings-but those familiar with her work know that words permeate her visual art. Louise Bourgeois: The Artist as Writer offers an important new portrait of the French-born New York artist, arguing that her extensive oeuvre can be read as a work of literature. While Bourgeois's statements, diaries, letters, and texts have long been visible, this book contends that they have not yet truly been read. Drawing on years of research in the Louise Bourgeois Archive in New York, Lea Vuong redefines the artist as a woman of letters. She asks how Bourgeois's art was impacted by literature and shows how Bourgeois consumed and produced knowledge daily by reading, note-taking, and diary writing; collaborating with writers, poets, and playwrights throughout her career; and experimenting with visual and verbal language in her art and everyday life. Vuong establishes how writing, reading, collecting, and making books were central to Bourgeois's artistic practice, paying close attention to Erasmus Books and Prints, the bookshop she ran in New York City during an overlooked but crucial period in her career. By revealing the literary foundations of Bourgeois's art and her bilingual engagement with French and English, this book provides a major reassessment of a canonical figure. Scholars and students of modern art, literary studies, and French culture will find a compelling new interpretation of Bourgeois's life and work.
Lea Vuong is the author of Pascal Quignard: Towards the Vanishing Point and coeditor of Francophone Oceania Today: Literature, Visual Arts, Music, and Cinema as well as a special issue of Word & Image on Louise Bourgeois.
"This incisive and elegantly argued study repositions Louise Bourgeois's extraordinary writing-diaries, letters, fragments, and psychoanalytic reflections-at the very heart of her practice. Grounded in meticulous archival research, it shows how these texts are not supplementary but constitutive, shaping our understanding of her sculpture, drawing, and performance. In tracing Bourgeois's movements through Francophone circles in Paris and New York, the book offers a subtle and compelling account of artistic formation, making a vital, original contribution to Bourgeois scholarship." -Jo Applin, author of Lee Lozano: Not Working "Louise Bourgeois: The Artist as Writer is a gorgeous book, examining Bourgeois's writing in its rich and multifarious experimentalism. Vuong brilliantly situates the artist-as-writer in her literary, critical, and artistic milieux alike, disclosing the playfulness as well as the conceptual rigor of her dances with language. A must-read for scholars-or simply fans-of transatlantic art and literature after World War II!" -Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry
