Artist Louise Brougeoise died over the weekend at 98. She was an “overnight” sensation at the age of 70, when she was “discovered” by the artworld after a lifetime of making art.

I loved her work  when I first saw it in person at a Brooklyn Museum exhibition in the 1990’s. Her gorgeous sculptures and “installations” in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber had organic, sometimes sexually explicit shapes, that were formal but with strong personal, psychological and historical themes centering on the human body.

Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn wrote about the artist in 2008, when she had a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Here is an excerpt. Read more here.

Louise Bourgeois is widely considered to be one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Although it could appropriately be called a retrospective, Bourgeois was already the subject of a previous retrospective, in 1982. Louise Bourgeois’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the first retrospective given to a woman artist at that institution. According to the current exhibit’s notes, the artist took the MOMA retrospective as a challenge since she did not wish to be categorized by her retrospective as being at the end of her career. So, at age 71, Bourgeois changed direction and began exploring new subjects, new materials, new media and new ideas, absorbing from the changes occurring all around her in the art world so that she could head off in new directions.

Among these new directions was her move, in the early 1980s, to a large studio space in Brooklyn. Louise Bourgeois began working in a studio in a converted garment factory at 475 Dean Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, near Flatbush Avenue. An interesting choice, since her family in France had been involved in a tapestry restoration business for many, many years. (See”Art kaleidscope” link below for more details.)

She will celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday on December 25th, 2008. She still holds Sunday gatherings with emerging artists and remains as demanding and challenging to younger artists, as she has been toward her own work.