Fantastic Reality : Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art

By Mignon Nixon

Book Overview

The art of Louise Bourgeois stages a dynamic encounter between modern art and psychoanalysis, argues Mignon Nixon in the first full-scale critical study of the artist's work. A pivotal figure in twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, France) emigrated to New York in 1938 and is still actively working and exhibiting today. From Bourgeois's formative struggle with the father figures of surrealism, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to her galvanising role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, to her subsequent emergence as a leading voice in postmodernism, this book explores the artist's responses to war, dislocation, and motherhood, to the predicament of the woman artist and the politics of sexual and social liberation, as a dialogue with psychoanalysis. Convinced that she could express deeper things in three dimensions, Bourgeois abandoned painting for sculpture in the 1940s,

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262140896
• ISBN13: 9780262140898
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.2" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher