Louise Bourgeois: Suspension

Bourgeois’s mother Joséphine dies on September 14th.

Bourgeois receives her baccalaureate in philosophy from Lycée Fénelon on October 29th, and enters the Sorbonne in November, studying solid geometry and differential calculus.

1933 Depressed by the death of her mother, Bourgeois abandons the study of mathematics and begins to study art. Over the next several years, she studies in various art schools and artists’ ateliers in Montparnasse and Montmartre, including the Académie d'Espagnat; the atelier of Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson; the École du Louvre; the École des Beaux-Arts with Devambez and Colarossi; the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Othon Friesz in painting and Wlérick in sculpture; the Académie Julian; and the Académie Scandinavie with Charles Despiau, who was Auguste Rodin's assistant.

Bourgeois exhibits a painting at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon des Artistes Français.

1934 At the suggestions of her teacher Paul Colin, Bourgeois makes a second trip to Russia, this time to see the Moscow Theater and the work of the Russian Constructivists.

1936–1938 Bourgeois is a massière at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the studio of Yves Brayer.

She also studies under Marcel Gromaire and André Lhote, and becomes a fully certified docent at the Louvre. In addition, Bourgeois studies with Fernand Léger who suggests that her sensibility leans more towards the three dimensional.

Bourgeois exhibits at the Galerie de Paris in the “Exposition de L’Atelier de la Grande Chaumière,” and with the Ranson group at Galerie Jean Dufresse in the exhibition “La Groupe 1938–1939.”

1938 Bourgeois partitions off part of her father’s tapestry gallery at 174 Boulevard Saint-Germain and opens her own art gallery dealing in prints and paintings by Delacroix, Matisse, Redon, Valadon and Bonnard. There she meets Robert Goldwater, an American art historian who is in Paris doing research for his doctoral thesis “Primitivism in Modern Painting.” They marry on September 12th in Paris.

In October, Bourgeois moves to New York City with Robert Goldwater.

1939 Bourgeois enrolls at the Art Students League in New York City, studying with Vaclav Vytlacil, and will work there until 1945. She begins making prints and starts to exhibit in the United States.

Bourgeois and Goldwater return to France to arrange for the adoption of Michel Olivier, an orphan, who was born in Margaux near Bordeaux in 1936.

1940 Michel Olivier arrives in New York on May 21st.

Jean-Louis Thomas Bourgeois is born to Bourgeois and Goldwater on July 4th.