Louise Bourgeois. Edited by Frances Morris and Marie-Laure Bernadac. Rizzoli (in association with Tate Modern). Cloth, 304 pages, 240 color and black-and-white illustrations, 2007. ISBN 10: 0847831310. $65.

In 2000, sculptor Louise Bourgeois created Maman, a thirty-foot steel spider bearing marble eggs, and three monumental towers for the inauguration of London’s Tate Modern museum. Looming over crowds in the massive Turbine Hall, they offered a glimpse into the complex psyche of one of the world’s most prolific artists, who has confronted haunting memories, emotional turmoil, and sexuality for seven decades. This commission fixed her status as a mature player in the twentieth-century art scene, significant enough to usher in the next millennium at a new, vital cultural venue.

This year, Tate Modern digs deeper with a retrospective exhibition of Bourgeois’ work from 1938, when she immigrated to New York from France to begin a steady studio practice, through 2007, when the retrospective opened in London. After an appearance in Paris, the show travels this summer to the Guggenheim Museum (June 27–Sept 28), followed by visits to LA MOCA and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The companion catalogue, Louise Bourgeois, does a remarkably successful job of presenting the artist’s life and work as inextricably interwoven—an appropriate metaphor considering the impact of her family’s longtime occupation in tapestry repair, apparent in the name she bestowed upon the millennial towers: I Do, I Undo, and I Redo.

What differentiates this book is a clever glossary structure, simultaneously linear and nonlinear, that meshes scholarly essays, historic context, autobiographical statements, anecdotes, and lush visuals into one seamless package. (Although the table of contents refers to an “A–Z of writings by, on and about” the work, X, Y, and Z mysteriously never appear, perhaps a coy reference to her disavowal of surrealism.) Editor and curator Frances Morris explains in her introduction that the glossary provides “a rather different type of content: speculative, open-ended, provisional,” reflecting Bourgeois’ methodology and mindset. Her essay clearly recounts career milestones, while making chronological sense of Bourgeois’ specific bodies of work: early paintings, totemic sculptures called Personages, soft visceral work of the 1960s, a phase of pink marble carvings, later room-like installations, and most recently, fabric structures.

Browsing the glossary is akin to surfing the Web, an activity that apparently fascinates Bourgeois. Her obsessions are apparent, too, judging by entries under the letter A alone: Abandonment, Aggression, Agoraphobia, Anger, and Anxiety. Many entries refer to family, notably her abusive father, Louis, and beloved mother, Joséphine, the source of her maternal ambivalence. Other entries describe key works, such as Red Rooms (1994), a pair of chambers she calls Cells, and dimensional narratives rife with found and handmade props steeped in meaning.

Amazingly, Bourgeois waited until 1982 for serious recognition, when MoMA honored her with its first solo retrospective of a female artist. Despite intimacy with the pre-war Parisian art scene, an apprenticeship with Fernand Léger, marriage to a notable American art critic, and decades of dedicated studio work, Bourgeois’ career only blossomed at age seventy-one. Always the iconoclast, she creates difficult, provocative, emotionally charged art on her own terms. Put simply: “Life is made of experiences and emotions. The objects I have created make them tangible.”

Juanita Dugdale is a writer based in Maine and New York whose articles have appeared in design publications such as Baseline, Domus, I.D., and Print. A contributing editor of Interiors, she is currently collaborating on a book about wayfinding design.

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