Louise Bourgeois, born in 1911, was a pioneering French-American artist known for her powerful and multifaceted body of work. Spanning sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, her art delved into themes of identity, sexuality, and the human experience. Among her most iconic works are the large-scale spider sculptures, such as “Maman,” which symbolize maternal strength and the complexities of family relationships.
Throughout her career, Bourgeois explored deeply personal subjects, drawing from her own experiences and memories. Her art often featured recurring motifs, including the human body, architecture, and domestic objects, used to evoke themes of vulnerability and desire.
Bourgeois’s work has had a profound impact on contemporary art and feminist discourse, challenging gender norms and inspiring future generations of artists, particularly women. Despite facing challenges, she remained dedicated to her artistic vision, leaving behind a rich and enduring legacy that continues to resonate with audiences worldwide. Bourgeois’s ability to blend personal narrative with universal themes, coupled with her fearless exploration of the human psyche, solidifies her status as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.
Louise Bourgeois Quotes
1. “I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.”
— Louise Bourgeois
2. “Artists are born not made. There’s nothing you can do for them.”
— Louise Bourgeois
3. “Art is a way of recognizing oneself…”
— Louise Bourgeois
4. “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands…”
— Louise Bourgeois
5. “Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.”
— Louise Bourgeois
6. “Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.”
— Louise Bourgeois
7. “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”
— Louise Bourgeois
8. “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
— Louise Bourgeois
9. “To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.”
— Louise Bourgeois
10. “When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.”
— Louise Bourgeois
11. “I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
— Louise Bourgeois
12. “In my sculpture, it’s not an image I am seeking, it’s not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.”
— Louise Bourgeois
13. “Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.”
— Louise Bourgeois
14. “What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.”
— Louise Bourgeois
15. “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
— Louise Bourgeois
16. “It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.”
— Louise Bourgeois
17. “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”
— Louise Bourgeois
18. “The subject of pain is the business I am in – to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.”
— Louise Bourgeois
19. “I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.”
— Louise Bourgeois
20. “One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.”
— Louise Bourgeois
21. “A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.”
— Louise Bourgeois
22. “For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.”
— Louise Bourgeois
23. “An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”
— Louise Bourgeois
24. “The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.”
— Louise Bourgeois
25. “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
— Louise Bourgeois
26. “Don’t get the green disease of envy. Don’t be fooled by success and money. Don’t let anything come between you and your work.”
— Louise Bourgeois
27. “I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.”
— Louise Bourgeois
28. “To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if Im inspired by the results.”
— Louise Bourgeois
29. “I was a runaway girl from France who married an American and moved to New York City. Im not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.”
— Louise Bourgeois
30. “I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.”
— Louise Bourgeois
31. “My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.”
— Louise Bourgeois
32. “Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing.”
— Louise Bourgeois
33. “You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.”
— Louise Bourgeois
34. “Art is manipulation without intervention.”
— Louise Bourgeois
35. “I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”
— Louise Bourgeois
36. “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”
— Louise Bourgeois
37. “My knives are like a tongue – I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don’t love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife.”
— Louise Bourgeois
38. “And what’s the use of talking, if you already know that others don’t feel what you feel?”
— Louise Bourgeois
39. “Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.”
— Louise Bourgeois
40. “My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don’t do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.”
— Louise Bourgeois
41. “Look at it this way – a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.”
— Louise Bourgeois
42. “My life has been regulated by insomnia.”
— Louise Bourgeois
43. “Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation-and I like that.”
— Louise Bourgeois
44. “I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.”
— Louise Bourgeois
45. “My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed. They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.”
— Louise Bourgeois
46. “I work like a bee and feel that I accomplish little.”
— Louise Bourgeois
47. “It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.”
— Louise Bourgeois
48. “Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.”
— Louise Bourgeois
49. “I was raised a Catholic. But I am not religious. In my work, I am interested in real flesh and blood.”
— Louise Bourgeois
50. “He was the wolf, and she was the rational hare, forgiving and accepting him as he was.”
— Louise Bourgeois
51. “I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.”
— Louise Bourgeois
