Louise Bourgeois. Extrême tension

Major figure of contemporary art, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) built her oeuvre on the fringes of the major movements that marked the 20th century — surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism… — developing a deeply personal language that still exerts a profound influence on many artists. Settled in New York from 1938, she discovered printmaking in Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 — a technique that would become, along with drawing, essential to her entire oeuvre. Printmaking, drawing and sculpture feed on one another; words are inscribed within images; gestures are repeated like rituals. In 1995, the Musée national d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque nationale de France devoted two separate exhibitions to her graphic work, drawings on one side, prints and books on the other. On this occasion, the Bibliothèque nationale de France received from the artist an exceptional gift: around a hundred plates covering the entirety of her production, a collection later enriched by regular donations from the Amis de la BnF. The Cabinet d'art graphique of the Centre Pompidou, for its part, acquired recent drawings, mainly from the 1990s, to which were added several successive donations from the artist, from the Clarence Westbury Foundation and from the American Friends of the Centre Pompidou. Today, the Centre Pompidou holds 91 works (drawings, prints, sculpture and installation) and the BnF more than a hundred prints as well as eight artist's books. By bringing together for the first time these two complementary collections, the exhibition makes it possible to understand the interdependence of drawing and printmaking in Louise Bourgeois's work, and highlights the main themes that punctuate her oeuvre.