Writing the first comprehensive biography of a major artist could prove daunting, but taking on Bourgeois's long life in art might be called heroic.
Bridget Quinn
November 30, 2025
— 4 min read
Louise Bourgeois at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, 1937, photographed by Brassaï (image © Brassaï/courtesy The Easton Foundation)
Writing the first comprehensive biography of a major artist could prove daunting, but in the case of Marie-Laure Bernadac’s Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois, such an undertaking might be called heroic. Bourgeois lived to the age of 98, still active and furiously making art until the end. And according to Bernadac’s thorough and vivid account, the French-American artist kept nearly everything she made, read, wore, or wrote in the course of a long life. This includes Bourgeois’s massive oeuvre of sculpture, installations, prints, paintings, and drawings, along with letters dating back to her childhood, school notebooks, business transactions (hers and her parents’), and writing from at least as far back as age 11, when she first began keeping a diary. Even the hardiest biographer might buckle under the weight of so much material. Yet Bernadac, a French curator who knew Bourgeois and organized exhibitions of her work during the artist’s lifetime, is ideal to take on the task. She makes no effort to conceal her sympathetic perspective on her subject, while recognizing Bourgeois as an artist who was emotionally volatile, depressive, competitive, driven, and visionary.
While there is a certain headlong bravery in writing the biography of so biographical an artist, one raised in and around Paris but who spent most of her adult life in New York, Bernadac humbly suggests that her book is just the beginning. She likens it to “a gigantic tapestry,” and writes, “I’m leaving the tapestry unfinished, so that other, more profound studies may take shape.” Crisply translated by writer Lauren Elkin (whose excellent 2023 book Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art includes Bourgeois among its subjects), Knife-Woman is, if not necessarily profound, then impressively woven. And though it’s organized as a straightforward chronological account of Bourgeois’s life, Bernadac does veer from standard biographical practice by referring to her subject as Louise, a choice I appreciate for a variety of feminist and other reasons. Her use of first names extends to all the primary figures in the artist’s life, from her mother, Joséphine, and father, Louie (after whom Louise was named — he’d wanted a boy), to her husband, the esteemed American art historian Robert Goldwater.
Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York, c. 1946 (image © courtesy The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)The author deploys her metaphor deliberately, as Bourgeois was surrounded by tapestries growing up in her parents’ repair business, where her mother was responsible for the majority of the hands-on work. “The tapestry restoration workshop is the backdrop of all Bourgeois’s memories,” Bernadac writes, “the maternal material that structured and enfolded her artistic apprenticeship.” Bourgeois was employed at a young age by her mother to create replacement drawings for feet worn away when tapestries were dragged along the ground. Such a detail — repeatedly drawing feet (or other body parts) — is no doubt essential to the artist's later work. As is a passage about Bourgeois’s mother, who cut out “cupids’ genitals and other explicit parts and replaced them with flowers or fruits, because the puritanical American collectors couldn’t bear to see sexual organs on tapestries. Joséphine kept these woven bits of genitals clumped together in a box.” It’s not hard to image just such a box as a Louise Bourgeois artwork.
Bernadac’s text is augmented with reproductions of her work and photographs from every era of Bourgeois’s life, from family snapshots of a proper young woman turned out in Chanel, Paul Poiret, and Sonia Delaunay, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic 1982 image of a grinning Bourgeois with her penis sculpture, “Fillette,” tucked insouciantly under one arm.
Louise Bourgeois with "Sleep II," Pietrasanta, Italy, 1967 (image © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo: Studio Fotografico, I. Bessi, Carrara)While offering much incisive biographical information and important insights on Bourgeois’s work, Bernadac’s observations of the artist’s inner life can feel less perceptive. For example, “Louise, like a good hysteric, worried she was sterile – which is one of the things that led her to adopt a French orphan in 1939” (the oldest of her three sons, Michel, was adopted), or, “She had all the physical symptoms of hysteria: cramps, heaviness in the stomach, contractions in the diaphragm, diarrhea, insomnia.” While there’s no question that Bourgeois struggled with her mental state, spending years in therapy (and writing about it), Bernadac’s outdated and arguably sexist terminology, applied with such breezy certainty, is unconvincing.
On the whole, though, Bernadac’s book is an impressive undertaking that more than confirms Bourgeois’s wish for her career. “My credo,” the artist said in a 1968 interview, “is that I hope I will live long enough to say most of the things I want to say. That’s it.” She did.
Louise Bourgeois with "La famille" (in progress), New York, 2008 (image © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo © Alex Van Gelder)Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac with a translation by Lauren Elkin (2025) is published by Yale University Press and is available online and in bookstores.