Reviews

Bourgeois was an intensely autobiographical artist who poured her demons into her work. Her art was, she believed in a very literal way, her salvation.
In the new book, ominously but accurately entitled The Return of the Repressed, curator and writer, Philip Larratt-Smith makes much of Bourgeois' fear of abandonment and her complex love-hate relationship with her father.--Sean O'Hagan "Another Magazine"

In the early months of 2010, a trove of loose-leaf paper was discovered in Louise Bourgeois's Chelsea apartment. Marked with pen, pencil, and typewriter ink, the pages featured a fluent blend of French and English prose, punctuated by an occasional drawing. The writings hailed largely from the years spanning 1952--when Bourgeois was refining her brand of metaphoric abstraction in her Personages, a series of precariously assembled totemic structures--to 1964, when Bourgeois debuted her now-canonical sculptural aesthetic of turgid, visceral forms rendered in emotive arrays of latex, wax, and resin. This new, organic idiom followed an 11-year hiatus from the art world, during which Bourgeois underwent strenuous analysis at the hands of an émigré Freudian, Henry Lowenfeld--a foreigner, like herself, expatriated from a Europe ravaged by war.
Combined with a similar find of six years prior, this cache amounted to over 1,000 pages of rich psychic self-documentation. Here, Bourgeois had recorded her dreams, anxieties, and desires; parsed her sessions with Lowenfeld ("L.," in her affectionate abbreviation); and jotted ideas for new sculptures. Reproduced in part and translated for the first time in a sleek volume edited by Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, these writings reveal Bourgeois as an artist whose profound engagement with psychoanalysis was anchored in a sustained, often tortuous praxis.--Courtney Fiske "The Brooklyn Rail"