FREE — Auditorium doors open to public at 5:30 p.m.
In celebration of the unprecedented publication of Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, Robert Storr, author, art historian, curator, painter and critic; and special guest experts converse about the book and the artist's oeuvre and life. The discussion is moderated by Christopher Lyon, editor and Bookforum columnist. Robert Storr worked closely with Louise Bourgeois on the book for over twenty years.
In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her 1982 solo retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98.
Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois is the first comprehensive survey of Bourgeois's oeuvre and biography, and a unique critical evaluation of the intertwining of the two. Robert Storr, acknowledged as Bourgeois's leading interpreter, worked closely with the artist on this book for some twenty years. He describes her sometimes fitful but extraordinarily long and prolific career and explores the many metamorphic aspects of the work to which the alternating currents of her imagination gave rise to.
From his uniquely privileged point of view, Storr considers how such longevity, stamina, and accomplishment were possible and what prodigious imaginative powers that produced them. Long awaited, this handsome volume is sure to be among the major artists’ biographies of our time, confirming Louise Bourgeois’s legendary status, both as a witness to art history in her era and as one of its moving forces. Intimate Geometries is a riveting look into the life and works of this iconic artist.
Robert Storr is a painter, critic, museum man, and exhibition-maker. From 1990 until 2002, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. His group exhibitions there included ISLOCATIONS, a survey of installation art that included Louise Bourgeois, and Modern Art despite Modernism, in addition to which he organized retrospectives of Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, and Max Beckmann. From 1990 until 2000 he directed MoMA’s Projects program, for which he assembled small monographic shows by Art Spiegelman (the first exhibition devoted to a “comix” artist in MoMA’s history), Franz West, Ann Hamilton, and others. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and from 2006 to 2016 he served as Dean of the Yale University School of Art, where he is also a professor of painting. Since 1982 his essays, reviews, and columns have appeared in Art in America, Artpress, Frieze, Artforum, Corriere della Sera, The New York Review of Books (online edition) and numerous other magazines and journals.
Robert Storr’s latest book is Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (The Monacelli Press) for November 2016. In addition to catalogues written for shows he has organized in Brazil, Greece, Japan, Spain, and the United States, he has contributed to exhibition publications for all the major museums in New York and for many other museums around the world. In 2007 he served as Director of the Venice Biennale, the first American to hold that position. Storr is the recipient of five honorary doctorates and awards from organizations including the International Association of Art Critics and the Archives of American Art. In 2000 he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was later promoted to Officier of the same order. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York.
Christopher Lyon publishes art books in digital and print editions under the imprint Lyon Artbooks. He is the author of Nancy Spero: The Work (2010), a co-author and the editor of The Art and Spirit of Paris (2003), and writes regularly on art and art publishing. His "Artful Volumes" column appears in Bookforum. Lyon was a writer and editor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for ten years, and subsequently held senior editorial positions at publishers including Abbeville Press, Bulfinch/Little, Brown, The Monacelli Press, Prestel Publishing, and Rizzoli International Publications. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and pursued graduate studio at the University of California at Los Angeles and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. He lives in Brooklyn.
In its ninth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world
renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.
Events at The New York Public Library may be photographed or recorded. By attending these events, you consent to the use of your image and voice by the Library for all purposes.