Author Guide · Art & Artists’ Writings
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Louise Bourgeois started keeping a diary as a child in Paris in the 1920s and was still writing in her nineties in New York. The French-born sculptor, who died in 2010 at 98, filled diaries, loose sheets and the margins of drawings with what she called “pen-thoughts”, and after her death more than 1,000 pages of notes from her years in psychoanalysis turned up in her Chelsea house. Her written work exists in a handful of volumes: a 1947 artist’s book of engravings and short texts, a collection of writings and interviews, and an edition of her analytic notes. Around them sits a shelf of serious books by curators and critics who knew her. This guide covers her 10 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1947–2022 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
The essential books are her own Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998), a collection of writings and interviews from 1923 to 1997, the artist’s book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947) and The Return of the Repressed (2012), her psychoanalytic writings. The main books about her are by Deborah Wye, Mignon Nixon and Robert Storr. Start with Destruction of the Father: it is her own voice, across seven decades.
Where to Start with Louise Bourgeois
If you want her own words
→ Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998) — diaries, notes and interviews from 1923 to 1997.
If you want the full life and work
→ Intimate Geometries (2016) — Robert Storr’s 828-page study.
If you want her most private writing
→ The Return of the Repressed (2012) — the notes from her psychoanalysis.
If you want a book for children
→ Cloth Lullaby (2016).
10 Louise Bourgeois Books, in Order
He Disappeared into Complete Silence
Bourgeois’s first book: an unbound suite of nine engravings, each paired with a short text of her own, printed at Atelier 17 in New York and published by Gemor Press with an introduction by Marius Bewley. Copies are held by museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Louise Bourgeois
The catalogue of her first retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 1982 to February 1983, when she was 70. Deborah Wye, then associate curator of prints and illustrated books, wrote the 124-page text, with a foreword by William S. Rubin; the museum presented it as the first thorough examination of her paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture.
Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father
Edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist and published by MIT Press, this 384-page book gathers Bourgeois’s writing from her childhood diary onwards: notes, letters, poems, statements, the drawing-texts she called “pen-thoughts”, and interviews with journalists, artists and writers. The title comes from her 1974 installation The Destruction of the Father, and much of the book returns to her childhood and her father.
Fantastic Reality
The art historian Mignon Nixon reads Bourgeois’s work through Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis, and through four influences: motherhood, psychoanalysis, Surrealism and feminism. Published by MIT Press in six chapters, it also places her alongside Duchamp, Miró and Giacometti, and includes a chapter on Fillette and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of her holding it.
Louise Bourgeois
The catalogue of the Tate Modern retrospective (October 2007 to January 2008), organised with the Centre Pompidou, which showed more than 200 works and travelled to Paris, the Guggenheim in New York, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn in Washington. Edited by Frances Morris, it has 39 contributors, among them Rosalind Krauss, Julia Kristeva, Linda Nochlin and Marina Warner, plus unpublished material by Bourgeois and a full chronology.
The Return of the Repressed
Two caches of loose pages, found in her Chelsea house around 2004 and in early 2010, together run to more than 1,000 pages written between 1952 and 1964, mostly during her analysis with Henry Lowenfeld. Edited by her literary archivist Philip Larratt-Smith and published by Violette Editions, the volume reproduces and translates a selection for the first time: dreams, anxieties, notes on sessions and ideas for sculptures, in a mix of French and English.
Cloth Lullaby
A picture-book biography for ages five to seven, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault and published by Abrams. It follows Bourgeois as a girl helping in her mother’s tapestry workshop and connects those years to her best-known works. It received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus.
Intimate Geometries
Robert Storr, a curator who was part of her inner circle, began the book in 1985 and finished it more than thirty years later. The Monacelli edition runs to 828 pages with more than 1,000 illustrations, combining biography, formal analysis and the reception of the work, and ends with a chapter on his own relationship with her. Reviewing it in The Brooklyn Rail, Amei Wallach called it his magnum opus.
Louise Bourgeois
The catalogue of the 2017–18 MoMA exhibition of about 300 works, centred on her prints and illustrated books and shown beside related sculptures, drawings and fabric pieces. Wye, who curated her 1982 retrospective, traces how individual prints changed from state to state. Bourgeois made some 1,200 printed compositions, documented in MoMA’s online catalogue raisonné.
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child
The catalogue of the first major exhibition devoted only to the fabric and textile works she made from the mid-1990s until her death, shown at the Hayward Gallery in London and the Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2022. Edited by Ralph Rugoff and published by Hayward Gallery Publishing and Hatje Cantz, with texts by Lynne Cooke, Rachel Cusk, Julienne Lorz and Joseph Logan.
In What Order to Read Louise Bourgeois
These books do not form a sequence, so read by what you want. Her own words are in three books: He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998) and The Return of the Repressed (2012). Read the 1998 collection first; the 2012 volume is more private and makes most sense once you know the outline of her life.
The books about her are best read from short to long: a catalogue such as Tate’s 2007 volume for the whole career, Mignon Nixon for the psychoanalytic argument, and Robert Storr’s Intimate Geometries when you want everything.
A reading path
1. Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998)
2. Louise Bourgeois, Tate (2007)
3. The Return of the Repressed (2012)
4. Fantastic Reality (2005)
5. Intimate Geometries (2016)
More Books by and About Louise Bourgeois
Beyond the 10 key books: 3 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Catalogues and studies
3
3 books · 1994–2001
- 1994The Prints of Louise Bourgeoisthe first catalogue raisonné of her prints, with Carol Smith
- 2000The Insomnia Drawingsdrawings made during sleepless nights
- 2001Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writingan essay on a single work
The years · 1911–2010
Quick facts about Louise Bourgeois
- Known for
- Louise Bourgeois is known for sculpture and installations about childhood, family and memory, from the Cells to her giant spiders such as Maman (1999).
- 1911
- Born in Paris
- 1938
- Settles in New York with Robert Goldwater
- 2010
- Dies in New York, aged 98
- Born
- 25 December 1911, Paris
- Died
- 31 May 2010, New York, aged 98
- Family
- Her parents dealt in antique tapestries and ran a restoration workshop in Choisy-le-Roi
- Moved
- To New York in 1938, with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater
- Honours
- National Medal of Arts (1997); Golden Lion, Venice Biennale (1999); Praemium Imperiale (1999)
- Best-known work
- Maman (1999), the giant spider shown in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000
The red mark is 1998: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father, the collection of her own writings and interviews.
How Louise Bourgeois Writes: Diaries, Pen-Thoughts and Parables
Bourgeois did not write books in the usual sense. She wrote constantly: a diary from childhood, notes on loose sheets, lists, letters, and the short texts she set beside drawings and called “pen-thoughts”. Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father shows the range, and how often the same few subjects return: her father, her mother, the household of her childhood, fear.
Her published texts are short. In He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947) each of the nine engravings is paired with a brief text of her own, so that image and words are read together. In interviews she spoke plainly about her intentions, saying for instance that her work dealt with problems that are “pre-gender”.
The notes in The Return of the Repressed, written in French and English between 1952 and 1964, are the rawest material: dreams, anxieties and notes on sessions with her analyst Henry Lowenfeld, mixed with ideas for sculptures. Read beside the art, they show how directly she turned her own psychology into form.
Watch
Louise Bourgeois in Art21's Identity Episode
Louise Bourgeois speaks about drawing on her own life, memory and emotion in her sculpture, in a segment from the ’Identity’ episode of Art in the Twenty-First Century, first aired on PBS in 2001. From the official Art21 channel.
Frequently asked questions about Louise Bourgeois’s books
How many books has Louise Bourgeois written?
Her own writing is gathered mainly in three books on this page: the artist’s book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998) and The Return of the Repressed (2012). This guide lists 10 key books in all, including seven by curators, critics and a children’s author.
What are Louise Bourgeois’s books in order?
He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), Louise Bourgeois by Deborah Wye (1982), Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998), Fantastic Reality by Mignon Nixon (2005), Louise Bourgeois, edited by Frances Morris (2007), The Return of the Repressed (2012), Cloth Lullaby by Amy Novesky (2016), Intimate Geometries by Robert Storr (2016), Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait by Deborah Wye (2017) and Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, edited by Ralph Rugoff (2022).
Where should I start with Louise Bourgeois?
With Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998), which collects her diaries, notes and interviews from 1923 to 1997. For a book about her, start with a retrospective catalogue such as Tate’s of 2007.
What is Louise Bourgeois’s most famous book?
Of her own books, Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father (1998), edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Among the books about her, Robert Storr’s Intimate Geometries (2016) is the most comprehensive.
What is He Disappeared into Complete Silence?
Her first book, from 1947: nine engravings with short texts of her own, printed at Atelier 17 in New York and published by Gemor Press, with an introduction by Marius Bewley.
Did Louise Bourgeois see a psychoanalyst?
Yes. She was in analysis with Henry Lowenfeld, and the notes she wrote between 1952 and 1964 — more than 1,000 loose pages found in her house around 2004 and in 2010 — were partly published in The Return of the Repressed (2012).
Was Louise Bourgeois a feminist artist?
She rejected the label. She said “There is no feminine experience in art, at least not in my case” and that her work dealt with problems that are “pre-gender”. Even so, her Femme Maison paintings of the 1940s became icons of the feminist art movement, and Mignon Nixon’s Fantastic Reality counts feminism among the four main influences on her work.
What is Louise Bourgeois’s most famous artwork?
Maman (1999), a giant spider in steel and marble, later cast in bronze, first shown in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000. In 2015 one of her spider sculptures sold at Christie’s for 28.2 million dollars.
Is there a children’s book about Louise Bourgeois?
Yes: Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois (2016) by Amy Novesky, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, for ages five to seven. It links her childhood in her mother’s tapestry workshop to her later work.
When did Louise Bourgeois die?
On 31 May 2010 in New York, aged 98. She was born in Paris on 25 December 1911 and had lived in New York since 1938.
Footnotes
- Louise Bourgeois — Wikipedia
- He Disappeared into Complete Silence — National Gallery of Art
- Louise Bourgeois retrospective — Tate press release, 2007
- Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait — MoMA
- The Return of the Repressed — The Brooklyn Rail, 2012
- Intimate Geometries — The Brooklyn Rail, 2017
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I need my memories; they are my documents.”
— Louise Bourgeois, as quoted by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
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