I was the library the other day picking up some books for my little boy when I wondered into the YA nonfiction section (which is incredibly small) to see if they had any books on building bridges or skyscrapers. (I'm sure you can understand why.) I didn't find what I was looking for there (I found it later and it's very cool) but did stumble on the biography of Louise Bourgeois, Runaway Girl by Jan Greenberg & Sandra Jordan. This was the only biography of an artist in the section and the only biography of a woman that I saw - in fact most of the shelves were full of manuals to pass the SATs and a bunch of titles that ran to "7 Habits of..." type writing. It was quite sad. But Runaway Girl looked very cool, with big pictures of Bourgeois's art and as I've never heard of her and know very little of 20th century art beyond the obvious (Homer, Rockwell, Kent, etc.) I picked it up. Turns out Louise was quite the interesting person and this book is an excellent look at an artist who dealt with very personal and often feminist themes while also trying to raise a family and still live the expected life of a mid-century woman in the 1930s and 40s. It didn't always work for her and while she did have some excellent shows in NYC in the late '40s and early 50's, after her father's death in 1951 she stopped showing. He was a powerful (and not always positive) influence in her life and grief clearly overwhelmed her. In recent years though, she has been rediscovered and enjoyed a lot of influence in the '80s and '90s in particular. Here's a great quote in the book on Louise was doing with her art:

According to women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, the ideal woman of the 1940s and 1950s cooked like Betty Crocker and looked like Marilyn Monroe. And here was Louise painting women who seed imprisoned, confined as well sheltered by their domestic role. She wanted children and considered having them a "privilege" but art also 'was a privilege given to me and I had to pursue it.'"

She had a very supportive husband who embraced her art - which moved from painting to sculpture - and that made a big difference, but still, the area of life that Louise chose to explore and portray was not one that many artists considered. She was certainly a woman ahead of her time (and is still going strong at 97.)

Coincidentally, while reading about Louise I came across a brief mention in the new VOGUE for the exhibition of Camille Claudel's work in the Musee Rodin. Claudel was a late 19th century sculptress whose work has long been overshadowed by her relationship with Auguste Rodin (they were lovers for ten years) and her descent into madness that found her committed to an institution for the last 30 years of her life.

The drama always seems more interesting than the work.

Here's the really creepy part about what happened to Camille:

For a while, the press accused her family of committing a sculptor of genius. Her mother forbade her to receive mail from anyone other than her brother. The hospital staff regularly proposed to her family that Claudel be released, but her mother adamantly refused each time. On June 1, 1920, physician Dr. Brunet sent a letter advising her mother to try to reintegrate her daughter into the family environment. Nothing came of this.

She died in 1943 and was largely forgotten - except for her relationship with Rodin, until the present show. It seems that Camille was born too much ahead of her time however - and suffered far too much as the result. Sometimes it really is tough to be a woman.

[Post pic: Louise Bourgeois in 1946, Camille Claudel in 1881 at age 18 and Camile working in Paris.]