Fantastic reality: Louise Bourgeois and a story of modern art

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 galvanizing 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.