Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This catalog of an expanded version of Bourgeois's 1993 Venice Biennale exhibition focuses on the artist's production of the last decade as the culmination of a stylistically independent creative pursuit of more than 40 years. Although general information is provided regarding background, training, and use of various methods and materials, each of the essays also provides both didactic and interpretive information about specific sculptures and installations, with great attention paid to recurrent themes of anxiety, alienation, fear, pain, identity, sex, and death. Bourgeois's deeply autobiographical content, use of organic forms, allusions to the human body, subversive impulse, and exploration of the marginal are seen as foreshadowing the premises of feminist art in the early 1970s. Her work is also discussed in terms of its relation to contemporary issues regarding gender, sexuality, and the right to individuality; she is considered a significant influence on many of today's important artists, particularly those who deal with the human body from a psychological point of view. For these reasons, this book would be an important inclusion in any library that serves students of art. S. L. Jenkins; University of Southern California

Booklist Review

Bourgeois, now 83, has been making sculptures for more than five decades, mostly in benign obscurity. She has acknowledged the fact that her work was shown but not sold by stating, "My image remained my own, and I am very grateful for that. I worked in peace for forty years. The production of my work had nothing to do with the selling of it." Kotik, curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, succinctly and insightfully surveys Bourgeois' life and identifies Bourgeois' themes as "anxiety, alienation, love, identity, sex, and death." These universal obsessions inspired Bourgeois to evolve a potent lexicon of suggestive organic forms that mingle male and female, human and animal. Then, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of Bourgeois' distinctively feminist and even subversive work. This milestone seems to have been a catalyst for Bourgeois, who is experiencing her most intense and productive era. The vital, innovative, provocative, and psychologically sophisticated works displayed in this volume, especially the "lairs" and "cells," were all made in the last 11 years, and they are the creations of a major artist in her prime. ~--Donna Seaman