Louise Bourgeois - The „Spiderwoman“ Behind The Kanye Cover Art?
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. She’s best known for her large scale sculptures and installations. Nevertheless, she was also a passionate painter and printmaker.
She was born in 1911 in Paris, where she grew up and started to study mathematics. When her mother died in 1932 she decided to drop out of the Sorbonne [university] and pursue a career in arts, eventually graduating from Sorbonne with a degree in art studies in 1935. She went on to learn from artists in Paris, where she would gain the first-hand experience by visiting their galleries.
In 1938 she and her husband moved to NYC where she found herself struggling with the transition to a new country. Later she more and more got in touch with surrealism and abstract art, meeting with artists such as Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock.
Bourgeois can’t be put into a specific art movement, however, her art show feminist motives and subjects. She explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. Over time her art became more sexually explicit.
And even though she didn’t see her arts as feminist, she engaged herself in activistic groups such as Fight Censorship Group, a feminist anti-censorship collective that defended the use of sexual imagery in the artwork.
In the 1990s Bourgeois began to use the spider as the central image of her art. Her work “Maman,” a steel and marble sculpture alludes to the strength of her mother, with metaphors of spinning, weaving, nurture and protection. This sculpture was placed at several places all over the world, one in Roppongi Hills.
In the latest rumours, a painting of Bourgeois has been claimed to be the cover art of @kanyewest highly anticipated album “DONDA” which is set to drop on Friday. Like her, Kanye also often proclaims the death of his mother as a catalyst for his artistic career.
If the rumours are true and if Kanye really drops the album; who knows?
