Book Review: Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois: A Story of Modern Art, by Mignon Nixon

The first image in Mignon Nixon’s new study of Louise Bourgeois is a photograph of the artist taken in
1947 in a New York apartment. She is kneeling on the floor in a gesture of mock homage to Joan Miró
who is enthroned in an armchair and cloaked in a painted robe with each bare foot resting on a pile of
books about Picasso. A note tells us that the photograph was originally published in Artforum on the
occasion of the 1994 Miró retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The re-publication
of the photograph, this time at the beginning of an art historical monograph devoted to the work of
Louise Bourgeois, provides a neat visual condensation of the framework that structures this study of
her practice: surrealism, psychoanalysis and feminism.