The edition of Louise Bourgeois and Robert Goldwater’s letters: work in progress

Abstract

Abstract This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer. The essay also examines specific passages from letters by Bourgeois addressed to her husband, and from letters by Goldwater to Bourgeois. These letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of a marriage, which Louise Bourgeois, despite the self-constructed autobiographical nature of her work, kept mostly aside and private. Arguing that a publication of the Bourgeois–Goldwater correspondence enriches the scholarship on Louise Bourgeois and provides new research leads, this essay also instigates a subjective approach to the edition of Bourgeois’s and Goldwater’s letters as a work in progress, reflecting on the technical and ethical challenges it creates. The essay poses a wider interrogation of the possibilities and difficulties of archival research and the recasting of archival documents into published pieces of writing