Louise Bourgeois. Album

Louise Bourgeois. Introduction by Peter Blum.

Peter Blum Edition. New York. 1994. Limited to 850 copies. Beige cloth-bound hardback with brass binding screws. 123 pages. 68 black and white photographs, with captions printed on half-page glassine overlapping the photos. English. 305 x 215mm. 1.3kg. 9780935875133. Fine.

'My name is Louise Josephine Bourgeois. I was born 24 December, 1911, in Paris. All my work in the past 50 years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood.'

Louise Bourgeois' creation of a "family photo album", examining the influence of her childhood on her work. Photographs from Bourgeois' childhood - herself, parents, siblings, cousins, homes, neighbourhood, animals - are interspersed with personal short texts, creating a visual memoir. Her failure to be a boy, her mother's independence and work as a tapestry repairer, her father's departure for war and his infidelity, the arrival of her orphaned cousins, the importance of animals all formed an influence which she was unable to detach from and which she constantly explored in her work. Loosely inserted is a manuscript postcard from Klaus Baumgartner, the book's designer.