Marie-Laure Bernadac - Böcker

The first major biography on artist Louise Bourgeois brings the life and work of an iconic twentieth-century artist into sharp focus“The mischievous French artist comes alive in this deeply personal biography.”—Chloë Ashby, Times (UK) Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She is known for a body of work that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking but eludes any aesthetic classification. Her life and art were so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell them apart. In her own words: “Sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture.” Marie-Laure Bernadac’s biography of Bourgeois traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman’s life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist’s unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. Bernadac elucidates Bourgeois’s friendships and rivalries with other major figures, including sculptor Louise Nevelson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. She also draws on Bourgeois’s well-known fascination with psychoanalysis to explore the deeply autobiographical nature of her artwork. This erudite and keenly insightful biography pays tribute to the talent of the artist and the complexity of the person.

In the 1970s, in the region of the Landes, between Bayonne and Peyrehorade, on the banks of the Adour River, the photographer Jeannette Leroy and the art dealer Paul Haim created a sculpture garden around a modest farm, La Petite Escalère.With the help of the faithful gardener Gilbert Carty, amidst canals, bridges, paths made of railway ties, and many trees and flowers, they installed about 50 works, some of them monumental, by artists such as Rodin, Maillol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Zao Wou-Ki, Françoise Lacampagne, Cárdenas, Mark Di Suvero, Léger, Matta, Zigor… Paul positioned the sculptures, and to help them vanish into the natural environment Jeannette would plant a shrub, a rosebush, dahlias, an oak, a maple, a gingko, a Caucasian walnut… “I don’t want this garden to become ridiculous!” she said.Paul Haim has evoked the bewitching beauty of La Petite Escalère better than anyone else: “The nonchalant visitor will pass from the shade of Les Barthes to the brightness of the Moura, from the freshness of the fountains to the suffocating heat of the forest. Coming around a bush, he allows himselfto be surprised by an unusual presence. Immutable. … Far from the agitations of the world, sinking into nothing-ness, watching the clouds go by, contemplating the places of joy.”Text in English and French.

An elegantly produced double portrait of the affinities and differences between two of the 20th century's greatest artists, Louise Bourgeois & Pablo Picasso Coupling the works of Louise Bourgeois and Pablo Picasso—at first glance, an unlikely pair—results in a thought-provoking discourse on the artists’ formal and iconographic links. Inspired by archaic and primitive sources, both Bourgeois and Picasso continually explored and developed interpretations of fertility and mother deities; late in life, both artists focused on eroticism, sexuality, and intimacy. This beautifully designed book, with its cloth boards and title stamping, builds upon the complex conversation about gender the exhibition sparks, with texts by exhibition curator Marie-Laure Bernadac (former curator at the Louvre, Picasso Museum, and Centre Pompidou), Émilie Bouvard (art historian and curator), Ulf Küster (curator at the Fondation Beyeler), Gérard Wajcman (psychoanalyst and writer) and Diana Widmaier Picasso (art historian).