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Nonagenarian sculptor Louise Bourgeois has in recent years emerged as one of the most highly visible and popular figures on the international art scene. Recognition, however, has come neither easily nor early to the artist. Born in 1911, Bourgeois studied at various Paris ateliers in the 1930s, when the surrealists held sway over the European avant-garde. After marrying the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and relocating to New York City, she continued in the orbit of the surrealists, many of whom sought refuge in the United States during the Second World War. She achieved modest success in the 1940s, showing paintings, prints, and sculptures in venues associated with the surrealists and the emerging New York School. In contrast to her better-known male peers, however, Bourgeois languished in relative obscurity throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and waited for her first major museum exhibition (at New York's Museum of Modern Art) until 1982, when she was seventy years old. Since that time, she has been the focus of hundreds of exhibitions, illustrated catalogues, and other honors, including representing the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale and inaugurating London's new Tate Gallery of Modern Art in 2000 with its first one-person exhibition. Even so, serious scholarly attention to Bourgeois's career has continued to lag behind popular interest in the artist and her work.
Mignon Nixon's ambitious and illuminating analysis, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, is the first book-length scholarly monograph devoted to the artist and a highly welcome addition to the field of cultural studies. Nixon finds an apt approach to Bourgeois's art through psychoanalysis, a discourse that, like modern art, spans the twentieth century. Pathographic interpretations of Bourgeois's emotionally suggestive, body-based forms have frequently