During the War: Shortage of Food in Easton

Louise Bourgeois

1942-1944

A woodcut in which Bourgeois reduces a domestic interior—furniture, patterned walls, and a rug—to blocky, color-stained forms that suggest domestic strain during wartime.

Visually it strikes you with flattened, unevenly inked planes — a scarlet floor, a black‑outlined cupboard with blue panels, and a mottled patterned wall — whose rough edges and misregistrations make the room feel worn and psychologically charged.

Produced during World War II, the print combines modernist abstraction with autobiographical and psychological concerns, pointing toward Bourgeois’s lifelong focus on memory, trauma, and the domestic sphere.

Palette

Art Terms

Woodcut Print Abstraction Furnitureand interiors Modern art Investigating identity

Exhibitions

Louise Bourgeois

1982

Committed to Print

1988

Paris at War: 16 Gouaches by Bernard Lamotte

1940

Twenty Lithographs: Graphic Art Processes

1941