Knife-Woman

The Life of Louise Bourgeois
By Marie-Laure Bernadac

"Marie-Laure Bernadac's Knife Woman is the first comprehensive biography of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), one of the most fascinatingly autobiographical and obsessively self-analytical artists of the 20th Century. Drawing on Bourgeois's enormous personal archive of diaries, letters, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as on numerous interviews and recollections from people who knew her, Bernadac has created an engaging and eminently readable account of the life of an artist who poured her demons into her work and believed that "everything comes from the mystery, magic, and drama of childhood." Bourgeois believed that art was her literal salvation. Bernadac’s accounts of Bourgeois’s art and life are inextricably interwoven as “color problem fields of fascination,” stitched together by autobiographical fragments and memory-threads of “oedipal struggle, ominous forces of repression, sexual symbolism, and material uncanniness.” The book reports on Bourgeois's fear of abandonment and her complex love-hate relationship with her father. It provides insight into the totemic properties of her art, her friendships and rivalries, jealousies and aggressions, traumas and creations, and 'the malady of femininity.'“
–Herbert Pföstl

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She is known for a body of work that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking but eludes any aesthetic classification. Her life and art were so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell them apart. In her own words: “Sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture.”

Marie-Laure Bernadac’s biography of Bourgeois traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman’s life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist’s unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. Bernadac elucidates Bourgeois’s friendships and rivalries with other major figures, including sculptor Louise Nevelson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. She also draws on Bourgeois’s well-known fascination with psychoanalysis to explore the deeply autobiographical nature of her artwork. This erudite and keenly insightful biography pays tribute to the talent of the artist and the complexity of the person.

2025; hardcover; 6" x 9.25"; 472 pages, 36 color, 35 b&w ills; ISBN: 9780300268300.