Mumbling Beauty Louise Bourgeois

Decades after meeting artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) in Paris in the late 1970s, Gelder (Louise Bourgeois, Armed Forces) began photographing the artist in her New York City home. This collection of 81 photographs from the early 2000s is both a sustained examination of the artist late in life and a playfully intimate collaboration with her. As critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist remarks in his brief introduction, “No picture is like another, each picture shows a different expression, mood, and detail, but each one is true to the artist.” In one of the first photos, Bourgeois wears a black mask and wields a knife, a mischievous smile creeping across her face. The very next shows her peering at the camera knowingly through a magnifying glass. Several photos show a blurry Bourgeois, her face contorted in anger, while others show her painting, cheerlessly holding one of her untitled prints, and failing to hold still as a pigeon lands atop her head. The photographs often include mirrors—vanity mirrors used as props, shiny tabletops reflecting the artist’s face and hands—and are a reminder that much of the artist’s work was of a personal and psychological nature. Fans of Bourgeois will appreciate this photographic accolade to the artist in the last years of her life. (Nov.)