Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois

Intimate Geometries is Robert Storr’s book on Louise Bourgeois, a critical biography and a study of her art in one volume of 828 pages with more than 1,000 illustrations.

Storr was a close friend of Bourgeois, according to Phaidon, and began the book in 1985. The Brooklyn Rail’s reviewer describes it as more than thirty years in the making. Storr was a curator at MoMA from 1990 to 2002 and dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016. Phaidon’s site carries the book under its Monacelli imprint, and twelvebooks lists it as a 2016 hardcover. The Rail says it follows her life and the forms she made, Storr’s reading of the psychological impulses behind them, and the changing reception of her work.

Bourgeois (1911–2010) worked for nearly seventy-five years. Sculpture was her main medium, and she used marble, plaster, bronze, wood and latex. Her 1982 retrospective at MoMA launched a productive late career. The publisher notes her contributions to Surrealism, Postminimalism and installation art, and says her work stayed independent of any style or movement.