Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art

Nixon, a senior lecturer at London's Courtauld Institute, has edited books on the work of Marcel Duchamp and Eva Hesse-two artists who can't quite bookend the irrepressible, major, still-working Bourgeois (b. 1911), but whose work, respectively, prefigures and comes out of Bourgeois's practice. Yet Nixon argues that the other major axis of Bourgeois's work (aside from modernism) is psychoanalysis, and she sets out to place the work squarely within the constructs of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, whom Nixon argues brought the role of the mother much further into play than Sigmund Freud. Along the way, she sketches a broader trajectory for women artists like Hesse, Nancy Spero and Yayoi Kusama. Like many of MIT's October series of books, this book is thick with brilliant observations, but it requires a deep familiarity with, and care for, the particulars of international modernism, the full sweep of psychoanalysis and the ends of feminist theory.