At home with the artist: exploring the Louise Bourgeois Archive

Abstract This special issue on French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) brings together essays by curators and scholars who have spent time in her Archive, located next to the artist’s home in New York. This article presents the special issue and how it regroups contributions by authors who share the same object of study but who are rarely brought into dialogue with each other. They range from museum and gallery professionals to academics in art history and literary studies, who have written their contributions in French or in English. An interdisciplinary and bilingual space for established and new critical voices on Louise Bourgeois, this special issue is a scholarly état présent of the research undertaken at the Louise Bourgeois Archive. It brings to light interactions between word and image, literature and visual art in her work, and the importance of writing and words for Louise Bourgeois. This article also reflects on some of the risks faced by researchers in the Archive. It defines some of the tactics that such archival research requires, notably how distance, in order to assert an objective reading, can complement rather than cancel the seductive and feverish intimacy of archives and the interpretative gains they contain.