An Unfolding Portrait

An Unfolding Portrait is Deborah Wye's survey of Louise Bourgeois's prints and illustrated books. It is the first study to place this lesser-known, roughly 1,200-work body of work fully within the sculptor's larger practice.

The Museum of Modern Art published the 248-page catalog alongside a 2017 exhibition. It reproduces more than 270 prints and books, organized thematically, tracing motifs Bourgeois returned to across sculpture, drawing and painting. Wye, MoMA's longtime curator of prints and illustrated books, follows the evolving states and variants behind individual compositions. The book also includes interviews with Bourgeois's studio assistant, her printer and her publisher, plus a chronology and bibliography focused on this side of her work.

Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 to a family of tapestry restorers and worked in painting and printmaking before turning to sculpture in the late 1940s. Wye organized MoMA's first Bourgeois retrospective in 1982, when the artist was 70, and continued working with her prints until Bourgeois's death in 2010 at 98.