Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s most respected sculptors. Over a long career she has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art.

Barbara Flug Colin interview with Louise Bourgeois (1982)

BFC : The vision of a little girl trapped and looking out at the world?

LB : Yes, the feeling of being trapped...and the theme of escape...On the one hand you are trapped by the past, and there is nothing you can do about it except running from it...the art comes from those unsatisfied desires.

LB: All the drawings on linen and the tinted--not painted — tinted self-portrait at that period [1946-47] were...sketches or notations for sculptures. I had three children, and I didn't have a place, physically, to do the sculpture...In '41 we moved to..."Stuyvesant Folly" on 18th Street. It had an immense mansard roof...I went up to the roof and did the sculpture because I had the space...There is a very significant evolution there where the retirement, the withdrawal, in the maison evolves. And some kind of strength. There's no courage there. It's just strength to go on. Then the presences appear.

BFC : By the 1960s, the "structure" of the original Femme-Maison is gone. Entered?

LB: It is a progression. The strength you need to explore your own fate and your own situation...It is a psychological evolution.

BFC : We name those 'people outside' but they're also something about us.

Louise Bourgeois interviewed by Donald Kuspit (1988)

DK: You seem to prefer the hardest material, the material with the most resistance.

LB: Yes. I think I do expression myself best in marble. It permits one to say certain things that cannot obviously be said in other materials.

DK: Such as?

LB: Persistence, repetition, the things that drive you towards tenacity, that force you to be tenacious. I am a tenacious person. Art comes from life. Art comes the problem you have in seducing birds, men, snakes – anything you want. It is like a Corneille tragedy, where everybody is pursuing somebody else. You like A, and A likes D, and D likes… Being a daughter of Voltaire and having an education in the 18th century rationalists, I believe that if you work enough, the world is going to get better. I work like a dog on all these… contrapoints, I am going to get the bird I want….

……
DK: Are you a feminist? What do you think of feminism in the art world? How do you respond to the idea of being an important woman artist?

LB: Well, I don’t think it is particularly flattering… My feminism expresses itself in an intense interest in what women do. But I’m a complete loner. It doesn’t help me to associate with people; it really doesn’t help me. What helps me is to realize my own disabilities and to expose them. Another very sad statement is that I truly like only the people who help me. It is very, very sad statement.

DK: But you don’t feel there is any special prejudice against woman artists?

LB: No. Many artists have been ignored. This is the problem. To be ignored is not the same as to be discriminated against. I don’t think many are discriminated against, but many are certainly ignored. It is part of the situation of man being a wolf to man; it is part of the way man is a wolf to man.

Louise Bourgeois interviewed by Rachel Cooke (14 October 2007, The Observer)

RC: You moved to New York early in your career. What effect did this have?

LB: I was a 'runaway girl' from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I'm not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup. In coming to New York, I was suddenly independent from them. I did feel the affects of being French. There was both isolation and stimulation. Homesickness was the theme of the early sculptures.

……
RC: In the Fifties and Sixties, the art market ignored you a little. Was this frustrating? Was it connected to your sex? How and why did things change?

LB: The Fifties were definitely macho and the Sixties less so. The fact that the market was not interested in my work because I was a woman was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to work totally undisturbed. Don't forget that there were plenty of women in a position of power in the art world: women were trustees of museums, the owners of galleries, and many were critics. Surely, the Women's Movement affected the role of women in the art world. The art world is simply a microcosm of the larger world where men and women compete.